Another open letter from Republicans endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential bidjust dropped.
This one, first reported by the New York Times, is signed by 111 former national security and foreign policy officials who worked under former presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush—and, yes, Trump himself.
The blistering letter characterizes Trump as “unfit to serve,” alleging that he “cannot be trusted” to uphold the Constitution. The signatories include onetime Republican stalwarts such as Charles Boustany, the Louisiana congressman who gave the party’s rebuttal to former President Obama’s speech to Congress about health care reform; William Cohen, secretary of defense in the Clinton administration and former senator from Maine; Gen. Michael Hayden, CIA and National Security Agency director under Obama and George W. Bush; and Miles Taylor, former chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump.
The group writes that they “firmly oppose” Trump’s reelection, alleging that “as President, he promoted daily chaos in government, praised our enemies and undermined our allies, politicized the military and disparaged our veterans, prioritized his personal interest above American interests, and betrayed our values, democracy, and this country’s founding documents.” The letter also states that “by inciting the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and defending those who committed it, he has violated his oath of office and brought danger to our country.”
Like Harris mentioned in last week’s debate, the supporters also write that Trump is susceptible “to flattery and manipulation by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping,” and that these influences, along with his “contempt for the norms of decent, ethical and lawful behavior” and “chaotic national security decision-making,” are “dangerous qualities.”
By contrast, they write, “Vice President Harris has demonstrated a commitment to upholding the ideals that define our nation freedom, democracy, and rule of law,” citing her experience as vice president, attorney general of California, and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. (The letter also cites some of Harris’ promises that have rankled some on the left, including her pledges to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”; to “always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself”; and to support the border security package that would hire 1,500 new Customs and Border Protection personnel.)
The group acknowledges that while they have concerns “about some of the positions advocated by the left wing of the Democratic party…any potential concerns pale in comparison to Donald Trump’s demonstrated chaotic and unethical behavior and disregard for our Republic’s time-tested principles of constitutional governance.”
Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s communications director, said in a statement that the signatories “are the same people who got our country into endless foreign wars and profited off of them while the American people suffered. President Trump is the only President in the modern era not to get our country into any new wars.”
As I have written, hundreds of other high-ranking onetime Republican officials—including ex-Reagan, Bush, Romney, and McCain staffers—have also publicly endorsed Harris over Trump, and urged other Republicans to follow their lead when they cast their votes. The Harris campaign has also been actively courting Republicans in what it calls “a campaign within a campaign.” This concerted effort to reach across the aisle is likely part of why a slate of new polls out today bring good news for Harris, showing her leading in the swing states of Pennsylvania and Michigan and gaining a six-point lead over Trump since the debate.
Another open letter from Republicans endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential bidjust dropped.
This one, first reported by the New York Times, is signed by 111 former national security and foreign policy officials who worked under former presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush—and, yes, Trump himself.
The blistering letter characterizes Trump as “unfit to serve,” alleging that he “cannot be trusted” to uphold the Constitution. The signatories include onetime Republican stalwarts such as Charles Boustany, the Louisiana congressman who gave the party’s rebuttal to former President Obama’s speech to Congress about health care reform; William Cohen, secretary of defense in the Clinton administration and former senator from Maine; Gen. Michael Hayden, CIA and National Security Agency director under Obama and George W. Bush; and Miles Taylor, former chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump.
The group writes that they “firmly oppose” Trump’s reelection, alleging that “as President, he promoted daily chaos in government, praised our enemies and undermined our allies, politicized the military and disparaged our veterans, prioritized his personal interest above American interests, and betrayed our values, democracy, and this country’s founding documents.” The letter also states that “by inciting the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and defending those who committed it, he has violated his oath of office and brought danger to our country.”
Like Harris mentioned in last week’s debate, the supporters also write that Trump is susceptible “to flattery and manipulation by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping,” and that these influences, along with his “contempt for the norms of decent, ethical and lawful behavior” and “chaotic national security decision-making,” are “dangerous qualities.”
By contrast, they write, “Vice President Harris has demonstrated a commitment to upholding the ideals that define our nation freedom, democracy, and rule of law,” citing her experience as vice president, attorney general of California, and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. (The letter also cites some of Harris’ promises that have rankled some on the left, including her pledges to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”; to “always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself”; and to support the border security package that would hire 1,500 new Customs and Border Protection personnel.)
The group acknowledges that while they have concerns “about some of the positions advocated by the left wing of the Democratic party…any potential concerns pale in comparison to Donald Trump’s demonstrated chaotic and unethical behavior and disregard for our Republic’s time-tested principles of constitutional governance.”
Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s communications director, said in a statement that the signatories “are the same people who got our country into endless foreign wars and profited off of them while the American people suffered. President Trump is the only President in the modern era not to get our country into any new wars.”
As I have written, hundreds of other high-ranking onetime Republican officials—including ex-Reagan, Bush, Romney, and McCain staffers—have also publicly endorsed Harris over Trump, and urged other Republicans to follow their lead when they cast their votes. The Harris campaign has also been actively courting Republicans in what it calls “a campaign within a campaign.” This concerted effort to reach across the aisle is likely part of why a slate of new polls out today bring good news for Harris, showing her leading in the swing states of Pennsylvania and Michigan and gaining a six-point lead over Trump since the debate.
Back in 2003, when Kamala Harris was first running for office in San Francisco, she wasn’t just battling Terence Hallinan, the erratic, older white guy who’d served as district attorney for eight years (and been her boss for 18 or so miserable months). She was running against the city’s powerful Democratic machine.
To win, Harris had to pull together her own support system—a network of accomplished and well-connected friends who were passionate, and practical, about helping women get elected. One of those early boosters was Andrea Dew Steele, a Hillary Clinton ally and former Capitol Hill staffer who had recently moved to San Francisco. Her dismay at how few women held local office in the early 2000s led her to co-found a training program for women candidates called Emerge California, and a few years later, a national version, Emerge America.
“The minute I met Kamala I thought she should run for office,” Steele told me back in 2007 when I was interviewing her for a profile of Harris. “She is extremely smart and very good on the policy side, but also, such a charismatic person.” But Harris needed convincing. “Men wake up in the morning and they think, ‘Well, I think I’ll run for president,’” Steele said. “Women need to be cajoled and encouraged. And they need training.” Once she was in, Harris proved to be an extraordinarily quick study, honing a clear message, raising lots of money, and winning over some influential pols (including US Senator Dianne Feinstein but not House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a machine stalwart and Hallinan loyalist). After starting the race with just 6 percent name recognition, Harris went on to trounce her old boss with 56 percent of the vote.
“Men wake up in the morning and they think, ‘Well, I think I’ll run for president.’ Women need to be cajoled and encouraged. And they need training.”
That 2003 race was a proof of concept. Twenty years later, Emerge (as it’s known today) and its state affiliates have helped elect more than 1,200 Democratic women currently in office, including two governors, two lieutenant governors, and eight members of Congress. For 2023 races, Emerge claims a 74 percent win rate—nearly 250 alums elected; this November, more than 600 alums are on the ballot. Steele, a social entrepreneur and philanthropic advisor, is now an Emerge emeritus; the organization’s current leadership reflects what it calls the New American Majority—an increasingly diverse and youthful electorate that Harris herself embodies. “I don’t think we’re surprised to see the original Emerge woman at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket,” says A’shanti Gholar, Emerge’s president since 2020. “It is such an exciting moment.”
But mixed with the exhilaration is also frustration with the racism and sexism that permeate politics and the media. Plus a serious concern with escalating and seemingly pervasive disinformation, which Gholar says, “really spikes when it comes to women candidates,” from the nation’s highest office to down-ballot races. Now, with Harris enjoying a historic candidacy, I was curious to learn more about how Emerge has evolved over these last two decades and what it is doing to make good on its mission of “creating a world where there are no more firsts”—where Black, brown and Indigenous women, young women, unmarried women, and LGBTQ women routinely run for office and win.I spoke with Gholar from her Washington, DC, base. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Both Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein—two of the most iconic women politicians of their era—came from San Francisco. But, the city’s Democratic power structure was dominated by men. What kind of hurdles did Harris face in taking that on?
People think, “Oh, San Francisco, it’s a Democratic city. There’s going to be lots of women in politics and expertise to tap into.” But that wasn’t the case when the vice president was starting out, and there was no place for them to go to get those basics of what it takes to run for office. It’s why our co-founders created Emerge. They were learning, right along with Kamala Harris: how to write a good bio. You have to put your contacts in order. You have to do the canvassing. You have to hustle.
Twenty years later, in most parts of this country, women candidates still seem to be outsiders.
Even in blue states, there are still so many offices where a woman has never been elected, a woman of color has never been elected, an LGBTQ person has never been elected. I say our work at Emerge has no end date because there are still a lot of good women that we need to get in office.
Thinking back to that first Harris campaign, and then fast forwarding to today, what are the most important things you’re trying to give women candidates? Where do you start?
One of the reasons the vice president was able to be so successful was that she had that network of support with her throughout the campaign. From day one, a huge part of Emerge’s training program is making sure that women are not alone when they’re doing this. From the minute you join the program, we are with you throughout your whole journey. From being in the classroom where we’re demystifying what it takes to run for office, to when you put your name on the ballot, to when you are elected and wanting to run for higher office, we continue to give you those tools, those skills, that support that you need to be a great candidate and a great elected official.
The core Emerge programs include a six-month training for newcomers and “boot camps” for women who are actually running. What do they consist of? I’ve heard they’re really intense.
A key part of our training is that participants are in a room with like-minded women who want to run for office, who have the same goals, the same values. It creates that sisterhood that is so important.
We also want to get them into the immediate mindset of, “Yes, you.” We start the first day by saying, your candidacy begins today, and really getting the women to start to see themselves as candidates, as future elected officials, and honing in on their “why.” For most women who run for office, there’s a singular “why” that drives them.
We then get down to, OK, how do you put your name on the ballot? How do you hire campaign staff? How do you fundraise? How do you do public speaking, debates, canvassing, phone banking— everything that you need to know, going through that very intensively. It’s not “OK, Phone banking 101.” It’s, “How do you run an effective phone bank? What are the different scripts that you need based upon the voters in your community?” A big piece is, calculating your win rate—what are the number of votes that you need to win? And helping build that campaign and their overall operation to be a great candidate.
So many of our alums say, “There’s no way I would have won if I didn’t do Emerge.” We’ve had alums who said, “I literally thought campaigning was going to be me canvassing in my heels, in a suit, because I still had to look professional.” And we’re like, “Please don’t do that!”
Campaigning in heels sounds extremely painful!
One of the most important things we impart to our alums is to be authentic. You don’t have to change who you are in order to get people to vote for you and to get elected. We see that with Vice President Harris. She has an authenticity that is showing through. Be true to you, because if you’re not comfortable in your skin, that’s going to show. Especially in this day and age, people feel like so many of their elected officials have failed them. Candidates who are from the community, who have the same shared experiences, who want to do good work—those are the candidates that people are looking for.
“Be true to you, because if you’re not comfortable in your skin, that’s going to show. Especially in this day and age, people feel like so many of their elected officials have failed them.”
You also mentioned hustle. In some quarters, it could have a bit of a negative connotation— “Oh, Harris is just hustling us.”
There’s a story the vice president told at our annual meeting this year that I love. She talked about putting her ironing board in her car and then setting up the ironing board at the grocery store—during that first campaign, that was her table. She was very grassroots; she had good hustle. I think that is something that we will continue to see from her.
You gotta be scrappy. I’ll take this from the fundraising point of view. We know that women candidates, especially first-time candidates, will almost always get heavily outspent. And we say, what you don’t have in money, you make up with in shoe leather and a good message. It’s putting your ironing board in the backseat of the car. Contacting that friend who is a great cook and asking them to do the catering for your event. It’s throwing house parties in the backyard to create an intimate environment. Just you DM-ing that local reporter saying, “Hey, do you want to come to my home, sit on my couch, and talk about my race?” Because that can lead to good press. Our alums regularly beat those smooth, “I-got-tons-of-consultants” type of candidates with their scrappiness and their hustle.
A lot of people are really surprised by how well Harris has been doing since The Big Switch. You hear all the time, “She doesn’t seem like the same candidate she was in 2019, or 2020.” And, “Where did she learn to give speeches like this?”
The person we see now is who the vice president has always been. I think that some people don’t want to recognize it, they don’t want to see it, and that’s something that we’re also very honest about. We tell our alums, “You’re not going to be for everyone.”
We also have to look at the role that the media plays in shaping the narrative about women candidates. I mean, there can be a race full of women, and they will somehow find ways to make the article about what they wore and not their policies. We see it all the time. We’ll hear, “Those men are running for the same seat.” But the women, “They’re running against each other.” We can have multiple men, but, why do there need to be multiple women? Why do there need to be two Latino women?
I’m very honest in telling our alums: We can teach them how to be confident on the campaign trail. We can make it a lot less lonely when they’re running for office. But we can’t take away racism and misogyny. At the same time, every time a woman puts her name on the ballot, every time a woman is elected, we are changing that narrative. When you see multiple women running for the same position, we’re normalizing that.
Another frequent complaint from journalists: Why hasn’t Harris done any press conferences? Why won’t she sit down for more interviews?
The reality is, we know that the vice president has done interviews before. There have been lengthy articles about her. It goes back to the whole media narrative: “Where’s Kamala? What’s Kamala doing?” My response is, “Everything and everywhere!” I get the e-mails from her team, and reading her daily schedule makes me exhausted.
They’re not avoiding the press, they’re being thoughtful about it. Frankly, they should be thoughtful because it’s a coveted interview—she is the prize. I say, take your time and do it right. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
When she did finally sit down with CNN, how do you think it went?
It was more about asking her to respond to a lot of the things that we have been hearing on the right from Donald Trump, and not a lot about her vision, how she’s going to govern. I felt it could have been a lot more forward-looking. That question about her ethnicity—“They’re saying you aren’t Black enough, you’re not Indian enough”—was that really something they needed to ask her? She gave the perfect response. But why are we constantly asking women to defend who we are?
As you see the candidate Harris has become, is there something she does that you wish you could bottle and hand out to all your Emerge candidates?
I actually will take this back to the vice presidential debate in 2020. It was her being there in her power. She let Mike Pence be Mike Pence, just like I expect she’s going to let Donald Trump be Donald Trump when they debate. And she’s going to focus on answering the questions about the real issues and talking about why she is the perfect candidate for this moment.
It’s what I love about her, something that women are seeing on the campaign trail and that little girls are seeing as they grow up. People are trying to diminish her, but she is not letting that happen. She is keeping that energy going and not letting the negativity seep in. Because the negativity, the racism, the sexism are all a part of wanting to scare us into not wanting to run for office and not making change. When she says, “You do not let people tell you who you are—you show them who you are,” it is such a masterclass in leadership and women owning their power.
The trend continues: Republicans are defecting from former President Donald Trump in droves.
More than 200 Republican officials who once worked for former President George W. Bush, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), and the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency and warned of the dangers of a second Trump term in an open letter released Monday.
The letter, first reported by USA Today, outlines both the foreign and domestic dangers of a second Trump term: “At home, another four years of Donald Trump’s chaotic leadership, this time focused on advancing the dangerous goals of Project 2025, will hurt real, everyday people and weaken our sacred institutions,” the group wrote. “Abroad, democratic movements will be irreparably jeopardized as Trump and his acolyte JD Vance kowtow to dictators like Vladimir Putin while turning their backs on our allies. We can’t let that happen.”
The signatories range from former volunteers, interns, and assistants to onetime high-level officials in the White House and Senate, including Jean Becker, former chief of staff for 24 years to George H.W. Bush; Joe Donoghue, Senate stalwart and McCain’s former legislative director; and David Nierenberg, national finance chair for Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. “Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected,” they wrote. “The alternative, however, is simply untenable.”
Steven Cheung, Trump’s spokesperson, said in a statement provided to Mother Jones: “It’s hilarious because nobody knows who these people are. They would rather see the country burn down than to see President Trump successfully return to the White House to Make America Great Again.”
Romney already said earlier this year he would “absolutely not” vote for Trump, but he does not appear to have publicly said who he will vote for. The New York Timesreported in 2020 that Bush would not be voting for Trump, citing “people familiar with [his] thinking”; Bush does not appear to have addressed the topic thus far for the upcoming election. Spokespeople for Bush and Romney did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones. McCain withdrew his support for Trump in the 2016 election after the Access Hollywood tape leaked in which Trump bragged about committing sexual assault.
The dissent within Republican ranks comes just days after several prominent Republicans—including some ex-Trump officials—sang Harris’ praises at the Democratic National Convention and urged conservatives to vote for her over Trump. On Friday, a dozen former White House lawyers who served under three Republican presidents—both Bushes and Ronald Reagan—also endorsed Harris over Trump, alleging that he would “threaten American democracy and undermine the rule of law in our country,” Fox News first reported. And as I reported earlier this month, the Harris campaign launched a group aimed at wooing Trump-skeptical voters to their ticket. A Harris-Walz campaign official pointed to these examples as proof of how the campaign has conducted outreach to moderate and independent voters.
Trump, meanwhile, seems to have trouble garnering support from his former staff, let alone from people across the aisle. According to a report published in the Washington Post earlier this month, only about half of Trump’s former cabinet has openly endorsed his reelection bid.
It appears that even the Trump campaign wants the former president to keep quiet.
That’s according to a story published by Politico this morning, which alleges that the Trump campaign is locked in a disagreement with the Harris campaign over microphone rules at the presidential debate on September 10, specifically over whether they should stay live throughout the debate.Politico reports that the Harris campaign wants the mics on, reportedly because they believe it will give Trump a chance to embarrass himself; Trump’s team is reportedly pushing for muted mics, which they say were the terms they agreed to when the debate was scheduled with President Biden before he dropped out.
In a post on X, Brian Fallon, the Harris campaign’s senior adviser for communications, encouraged Trump to “reject his handlers’ attempts to muzzle him via a muted microphone.”
Trump should honor his commitment to debate VP Harris on ABC on Sept 10 and he should reject his handlers’ attempts to muzzle him via a muted microphone.
The VP is ready to debate Trump live and uncensored. Trump should stop hiding behind the mute buttonhttps://t.co/Ym35j4cNKj
It looks like Fallon may have been right: Later on Monday, Trump told an NBC News reporter who had asked him about reports of the microphone dispute that it “doesn’t matter to me—I’d rather have it probably on.”
.@jake__traylor: "Would you want the microphones muted in the debate whenever you're not speaking?"
Donald Trump: "We agreed to the same rules. I don't know, doesn't matter to me. … The agreement was that it would be the same as it was last time. In that case, it was muted." pic.twitter.com/l7d7Odd7cb
“Always suspected it was something his staff wanted, not him personally,” Fallon posted on X over a video of the exchange. “With this resolved, everything is now set for Sept 10th.”
Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and ABC News, the network set to host the debate, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Jason Miller, senior adviser for Trump, alleged to Politico that the Harris campaign was “looking for a way to get out of any debate with President Trump,” and claimed the Harris campaign wanted both candidates to be seated with access to notes during the debate—which Fallon denied.
But it seems that Trump is the candidate hoping to avoid a debate. In a Truth Social tirade Sunday night, Trump alleged, without evidence, that ABC was biased and questioned whether he would take part in the debate, though he did not mention anything about the microphone controversy.
Harris, on the other hand, appears ready to go: “The VP is ready to debate Trump live and uncensored,” Fallon posted on X. “Trump should stop hiding behind the mute button.”
The Democratic National Convention wasn’t just four days of good vibes: It was also the cause of a major fundraising and volunteer boom for the Harris-Walz ticket.
A massive fundraising haul is nothing new for Harris.
The campaign has now raised $540 million since launching one month ago, which Harris-Walz Campaign Chair Jen O’Malley Dillon called “a record for any campaign in history” in a Sunday morning memo announcing the figure. Part of that is due to a convention-week bump: The campaign had its best fundraising hour ever just after Vice President Harris’s speech, according to the memo; another campaign spokesperson said a total of $82 million was raised during convention week. Those totals reflect funds raised by Harris for President, the Democratic National Committee, and joint fundraising committees, the campaign said.
A third of the week’s donations were from first-time contributors, almost a fifth of whom were young voters and two-thirds of whom were women, the campaign said. Volunteers are also fired up, as O’Malley Dillon reported supporters had signed up for nearly 200,000 shifts since Monday.
The massive fundraising haul is nothing new for Harris’s campaign: As my colleague Russ Choma previously reported, the campaign raised $81 million in its first 24 hours, which they said was the largest such take in history. And as I reported last month, it raised $200 million in Harris’s first week campaigning, two-thirds of which was said to have come from first-time donors.
Meanwhile, Trump spent the week struggling to gain traction as he ranted against Harris and the Democrats on his platform Truth Social. That may have something to do with the fact that not only has Harris been leading him in fundraising, but she has also been leading him in the polls.
The trend continues: Republicans are defecting from former President Donald Trump in droves.
More than 200 Republican officials who once worked for former President George W. Bush, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), and the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency and warned of the dangers of a second Trump term in an open letter released Monday.
The letter, first reported by USA Today, outlines both the foreign and domestic dangers of a second Trump term: “At home, another four years of Donald Trump’s chaotic leadership, this time focused on advancing the dangerous goals of Project 2025, will hurt real, everyday people and weaken our sacred institutions,” the group wrote. “Abroad, democratic movements will be irreparably jeopardized as Trump and his acolyte JD Vance kowtow to dictators like Vladimir Putin while turning their backs on our allies. We can’t let that happen.”
The signatories range from former volunteers, interns, and assistants to onetime high-level officials in the White House and Senate, including Jean Becker, former chief of staff for 24 years to George H.W. Bush; Joe Donoghue, Senate stalwart and McCain’s former legislative director; and David Nierenberg, national finance chair for Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. “Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected,” they wrote. “The alternative, however, is simply untenable.”
Steven Cheung, Trump’s spokesperson, said in a statement provided to Mother Jones: “It’s hilarious because nobody knows who these people are. They would rather see the country burn down than to see President Trump successfully return to the White House to Make America Great Again.”
Romney already said earlier this year he would “absolutely not” vote for Trump, but he does not appear to have publicly said who he will vote for. The New York Timesreported in 2020 that Bush would not be voting for Trump, citing “people familiar with [his] thinking”; Bush does not appear to have addressed the topic thus far for the upcoming election. Spokespeople for Bush and Romney did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones. McCain withdrew his support for Trump in the 2016 election after the Access Hollywood tape leaked in which Trump bragged about committing sexual assault.
The dissent within Republican ranks comes just days after several prominent Republicans—including some ex-Trump officials—sang Harris’ praises at the Democratic National Convention and urged conservatives to vote for her over Trump. On Friday, a dozen former White House lawyers who served under three Republican presidents—both Bushes and Ronald Reagan—also endorsed Harris over Trump, alleging that he would “threaten American democracy and undermine the rule of law in our country,” Fox News first reported. And as I reported earlier this month, the Harris campaign launched a group aimed at wooing Trump-skeptical voters to their ticket. A Harris-Walz campaign official pointed to these examples as proof of how the campaign has conducted outreach to moderate and independent voters.
Trump, meanwhile, seems to have trouble garnering support from his former staff, let alone from people across the aisle. According to a report published in the Washington Post earlier this month, only about half of Trump’s former cabinet has openly endorsed his reelection bid.
It appears that even the Trump campaign wants the former president to keep quiet.
That’s according to a story published by Politico this morning, which alleges that the Trump campaign is locked in a disagreement with the Harris campaign over microphone rules at the presidential debate on September 10, specifically over whether they should stay live throughout the debate.Politico reports that the Harris campaign wants the mics on, reportedly because they believe it will give Trump a chance to embarrass himself; Trump’s team is reportedly pushing for muted mics, which they say were the terms they agreed to when the debate was scheduled with President Biden before he dropped out.
In a post on X, Brian Fallon, the Harris campaign’s senior adviser for communications, encouraged Trump to “reject his handlers’ attempts to muzzle him via a muted microphone.”
Trump should honor his commitment to debate VP Harris on ABC on Sept 10 and he should reject his handlers’ attempts to muzzle him via a muted microphone.
The VP is ready to debate Trump live and uncensored. Trump should stop hiding behind the mute buttonhttps://t.co/Ym35j4cNKj
It looks like Fallon may have been right: Later on Monday, Trump told an NBC News reporter who had asked him about reports of the microphone dispute that it “doesn’t matter to me—I’d rather have it probably on.”
.@jake__traylor: "Would you want the microphones muted in the debate whenever you're not speaking?"
Donald Trump: "We agreed to the same rules. I don't know, doesn't matter to me. … The agreement was that it would be the same as it was last time. In that case, it was muted." pic.twitter.com/l7d7Odd7cb
“Always suspected it was something his staff wanted, not him personally,” Fallon posted on X over a video of the exchange. “With this resolved, everything is now set for Sept 10th.”
Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and ABC News, the network set to host the debate, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Jason Miller, senior adviser for Trump, alleged to Politico that the Harris campaign was “looking for a way to get out of any debate with President Trump,” and claimed the Harris campaign wanted both candidates to be seated with access to notes during the debate—which Fallon denied.
But it seems that Trump is the candidate hoping to avoid a debate. In a Truth Social tirade Sunday night, Trump alleged, without evidence, that ABC was biased and questioned whether he would take part in the debate, though he did not mention anything about the microphone controversy.
Harris, on the other hand, appears ready to go: “The VP is ready to debate Trump live and uncensored,” Fallon posted on X. “Trump should stop hiding behind the mute button.”
The Democratic National Convention wasn’t just four days of good vibes: It was also the cause of a major fundraising and volunteer boom for the Harris-Walz ticket.
A massive fundraising haul is nothing new for Harris.
The campaign has now raised $540 million since launching one month ago, which Harris-Walz Campaign Chair Jen O’Malley Dillon called “a record for any campaign in history” in a Sunday morning memo announcing the figure. Part of that is due to a convention-week bump: The campaign had its best fundraising hour ever just after Vice President Harris’s speech, according to the memo; another campaign spokesperson said a total of $82 million was raised during convention week. Those totals reflect funds raised by Harris for President, the Democratic National Committee, and joint fundraising committees, the campaign said.
A third of the week’s donations were from first-time contributors, almost a fifth of whom were young voters and two-thirds of whom were women, the campaign said. Volunteers are also fired up, as O’Malley Dillon reported supporters had signed up for nearly 200,000 shifts since Monday.
The massive fundraising haul is nothing new for Harris’s campaign: As my colleague Russ Choma previously reported, the campaign raised $81 million in its first 24 hours, which they said was the largest such take in history. And as I reported last month, it raised $200 million in Harris’s first week campaigning, two-thirds of which was said to have come from first-time donors.
Meanwhile, Trump spent the week struggling to gain traction as he ranted against Harris and the Democrats on his platform Truth Social. That may have something to do with the fact that not only has Harris been leading him in fundraising, but she has also been leading him in the polls.
The operating word of the Democratic National Convention was “vibes.” They’re good, if you haven’t heard. They’ve shifted. For a group of people often dismissively referred to as “bedwetters,” Democrats are as excited as they’ve ever been at having a roughly 50-50 chance of disaster. There was just a feeling. Everyone from Bill Clinton to Oprah wanted to talk about the “joy” the new nominee brought to the race. Attendees told me it felt like 2008. “Yes she can,” said Barack Obama. People carried around prints of Vice President Kamala Harris that looked like Shepard Fairey had painted them. I thought I even saw Bill Ayers while walking around in his old neighborhood on Sunday.
A few months ago, such a display of Democratic optimism would have felt impossible. For much of the last eight years, the Democratic Party has been defined by a simmering discontent over the administrations of the past and the primary battles that never ended. Biden, elected in an economic crisis and a global pandemic, had promised to serve as a transitional figure before yielding to a new generation of leaders. But as his reelection bid stumbled, he seemed, instead, like a bridge to nowhere.
Chicago offered a glimpse of what a soft-landing looks like, not just for the economy, but for a whole political party. Years of infighting and recriminations yielded to a policy consensus that sounded like an unusually appealing kind of working-class fusionism. Adding dental and vision coverage to Medicare. Stopping corporate price-gouging. Busting monopolies. Passing the PRO Act. Free school lunch and breakfast. On Wednesday, Tim Walz’s small-town biography doubled as a story not just about football defensive schemes, but about the crushing weight of medical debt and the imperative for government to wipe it out.
The sorts of issues that had often festered for years on the party’s left-flank were dressed up in a kind of general-interest dad plaid, and pitched to a willing audience by people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The new consensus did not just happen all at once. It happened, in part, because the current president rebuilt trust in what normie Democrats could accomplish. Biden was a bridge after all. Democrats in Chicago finally found out what was on the other side.
The crowd watches President Joe Biden speak at the 2024 Democratic National ConventionNate Gowdy
The change within the party was not just a matter of positive thinking. It was reflected in the substance of the event. The spectacle in Chicago was the total inverse of what transpired at the RNC. In Milwaukee, Trump and Vance had dangled the possibility of a new conservative workers party, in the service of an increasingly monarchical donor class. To make their case, they even rolled out a prominent labor leader, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, who argued that unions should seek friends in the Republican Party in the fight against “economic terrorism.” O’Brien’s gimmick seemed a bit credulous at a coronation for a corrupt plutocrat who had kneecapped organized labor as president; it looks even more foolish now.
While the RNC offered the illusion of transformation, Democrats showed off their capacity to actually change, and to elevate new leaders and ideas in the service, often enough anyway, of a politics for working people. Instead of O’Brien, the DNC gave a primetime platform to Shawn Fain, the United Auto Workers president, who took off his blazer midway through his speech on Monday to reveal a red union t-shirt that said “Trump is a scab.”
Fain, who took office in 2023, represented a new direction for an old institution. He was the product of a political revolution within the UAW, aimed at driving out stagnant and corrupt leadership, and as president, he pursued a more aggressive strategy, which culminated in a historic strike at the Big Three automakers last year. (Full disclosure, I am a member of the UAW.) His spokesman is a former organizer for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, and Fain rails frequently against “the billionaire class.” But his presence on stage spoke not just to a more ambitious and assertive labor movement, but also to the power of real political partnership—and the changes that Biden, of all people, had brought to politics.
The new consensus did not just happen all at once. It happened, in part, because the current president rebuilt trust in what normie Democrats could accomplish. Biden was a bridge after all.
The union’s recent successes, he pointed out every chance he got in Chicago, were powered by members but eased along by the White House. In remarks to reporters this week, Fain credited Biden’s revamped National Labor Relations Board, which Trump had stacked with corporate picks, for clearing the way for clean elections at notoriously difficult shops. When auto workers went on strike last year, Biden, Fain noted, became the first president to ever walk a picket line. And when workers struck in 2019, Harris, as a presidential candidate, was there too.
“Plants were closing under Donald Trump,” Fain said. “I didn’t see Donald Trump save one of them. I didn’t see Donald Trump try to save one of them.”
Fain was a ubiquitous figure throughout the week in running shoes and a rotating array of red and blue UAW shirts. The union had sold thousands of “Trump is a scab” tees since his speech on Monday. Everywhere he went, delegates—many in red union shirts of their own—would gather around him to have a word or take a photo. (He was also multi-tasking—Fain used his speech to deliver a message to Big Three automaker Stellantis, and even took a bus trip during the week to rally outside the company’s plant in Belvidere, Illinois.) On Wednesday morning, after watching Fain quote Ecclesiastes and the “great poet…Marshall Mathers” within the span of a few minutes at a breakfast with the Michigan delegation, I asked him about the party’s trajectory.
“After the Reagan years and Bush 1, you saw a shift somewhat where, because laws changed, deregulation happened, the massive tax cuts for the wealthy, trickle-down economics…and I think the party somewhat shifted to try to appease the business class and the corporate class,” he said, as we walked down an escalator at a Michigan Ave. Hilton. “I think that hurt in the elections, because when people look at both sides, they see the same people serving the same master.”
Things were looking up, though. He believed that Harris and Walz, like Biden, would bring the party closer to its “working-class roots.”
“It’s gonna take time—it’s not gonna happen overnight,” he said. “But we’re on our way.”
Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota and Democratic vice-presidential nominee, speaks on the third day of the 2024 Democratic National ConventionNate Gowdy
The week was a passing of the torch of sorts, not just for Biden and Clinton, but for the man who lost the nomination to both of them, Bernie Sanders. The Vermont senator, a more hunched but still fiery 82, is seeking a fourth and perhaps final term this fall, while still mostly talking about the same issues he’s been harping on for four decades—getting money out of politics, universal health care, and tackling “oligarchy.” At a small confab near the United Center hosted by his longtime allies at the Progressive Democrats of America on Monday, Sanders made a forceful case that the man whom Democrats had rallied behind to stop him from winning the nomination had been a real ally once in office.
“He was prepared to really bring about structural changes in this country,” Sanders explained, laying out a wish list from childcare to adding dental and vision coverage into Medicare. “That was Build Back Better, and we failed with the two corporate Democrats in the Senate—but what I want you to understand is he was prepared to do that.”
“You’re not gonna hear a lot about Medicare for All” at the convention, Sanders acknowledged. (Harris, who embraced a variation of the policy in 2019 during her presidential campaign, walked back her support this month.) But Sanders had been a leading voice calling for Biden to stay in the race, in part because of the strength of their working relationship. Although he and Harris are not as close, Sanders sounded positive when we spoke later that night about what a Harris administration might portend.
Harris said the words “we are not going back” six times. The dig at Trump was obvious. But it describes where the party is at too.
“I think the proposals that she has brought forth so far are strong proposals,” he said. “I’m really glad that she is focusing on housing, because I will tell you that it’s an area that has not gotten the attention that it deserves. And she’s right. You got a major housing crisis in Burlington, Vermont, Los Angeles, and every place in between, 650,000 people homeless, millions unable to afford housing, so I’m glad she’s focusing on that. I’m glad she’s continuing the efforts to lower the cost of prescription drugs, which is a huge issue. I’m glad she believes in eliminating medical debt, which is just insane that people go bankrupt because they have cancer. So that’s an important issue, and extending the child tax credit that we passed in the rescue plan to lower childhood poverty by 40 percent is also enormous. So I think she’s off to a good start.”
One of the reasons he was feeling optimistic, Sanders said this week, was because of what he called “the rebirth and revitalization of the trade union movement.” In Biden, he had found an ally on the inside, but in Fain—whom he singled out for wearing an “Eat the Rich” shirt during last year’s strike—Sanders saw the vanguard of a workers movement often aligned with the Democratic Party that could continue to drive change outside of it.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks on the first day of the 2024 Democratic National ConventionNate Gowdy
The gerontocracy at the top of the party has for a long time created the impression of a stultifying institution. The narrowness of the message Biden was capable of articulating—in contrast to the substance of the policies he was working to deliver—created an oppressive sort of aura. It was all harshly whispered words about “democracy” and the “soul of the nation.” Biden was standing in the way of not just Harris, but of a broader generational transition capable of saying so much more.
It wasn’t just Fain. Ocasio-Cortez, a fellow insurgent once on the fringes on the party, now had roughly the same prominence in the speaker lineup as Hillary Clinton, and attacked the Republican nominee as a “two-bit union-buster.” Everywhere you looked, there was some new star in the coalition, or soon-to-be-star in the coalition, seizing their five to 15 minutes to make their case. Many of these figures weren’t even in politics during the 2016 primaries. Their ideas and careers had been forged in the reactionary crucible in the Trump years.
Perhaps no one embodied this breakthrough better than Harris herself, a politician whose 2020 presidential candidacy floundered in a party still stuck in 2016, and who wallowed as an occasional punchline as vice president for three years.
“[O]ur nation, with this election, has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past, a chance to chart a new way forward, not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans,” she said in her remarks at the United Center. She said the words “we are not going back” six times. The dig at Trump was obvious. But it describes where the party is at too.
Going into the week, the grumbling, among the grumbling set, was that Harris was big on sunshine and light on specifics. But the program is simple enough: Making things easier for working-people, in easily recognizable ways—affordable housing, affordable groceries, affordable drugs, and affordable families too; the Child Tax Credit that Sanders promoted is such a popular idea that the Republicans who killed it are now running on bringing it back.
Democrats were also clear-eyed about what they were up against. Throughout the week, a procession of people—Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (first elected: 2018); Pennsylvania state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta (first elected: 2018); Saturday Night Live star Kenan Thompson—stepped up to the lectern with a comically oversized book, like something out of an old Cistercian Abbey, and announced that this was “Project 2025.”
During Thompson’s faux-SNL sketch, regular people took turns describing their life circumstances, and then Thompson would page through his big book and tell them how they were screwed. A woman named Nirvana happily announced that thanks to Biden and Harris, she pays just $35 a month for insulin. That was getting axed, Thompson cheerfully informed her. Another person said she was an employee at the Department of Education. She would be fired, Thompson explained. Someone else was happily married to a spouse of the same sex. Womp, womp.
The Project 2025 attacks were the sort of policy evisceration—at various points mean and fun and deeply moving—that I hadn’t seen in such portions since Obama’s scorched-earth campaign against Bain Capital and Paul Ryan’s budget. It is hard to say anything new about Trump. But the key to the Project 2025 attacks was that they didn’t just define Republicans as weird and creepy (although they did do that, in a mix of gut-wrenching and clever ways). That big oversized think-tank document gave Democrats a chance to talk about the things they consider normal. They were unafraid to talk about abortion. They went out of their way to talk about fertility treatments. They stood for the bedrock principle of doing what the doctor tells you to do. It fell to Walz, another relative unknown until Biden’s exit, to sum up this new middle-ground in his characterstically blunt way: “Mind your own damn business.”
The vibesiest scene at the DNC’s vibes-fest this week may have come at “Hotties for Trump,” an after-party where hundreds of zoomers picked up “Fuck Project 2025” condoms and posed for photos next to a couch that said “Property of JD Vance.” The event was bankrolled, like tens of millions of dollars worth of other Democratic operations, by the LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman.
Like the entire Harris campaign itself, the Democratic coalition’s kumbaya feel is fragile and potentially fleeting. There are already signs of potential crackups in this new unified front. “There are some Democratic donors who don’t like Lina Khan,” Sanders told me. “I happen to think that Lina Khan is the best chair of the FTC that we have seen in a very long time.”
Hoffman begs to differ, and in his criticism of one of the Biden administration’s most effective Big Tech trust-busters, you can see the shape of the battles to come. Those grocery stores where Harris wants to crack down on rising costs, for instance, include chains like Kroger—whose merger with Albertson’s Khan has put on hold. The week’s most glaring stain was the refusal to grant speaking time to a Palestinian-American Georgia state representative and Harris delegate—the sort of cynical and short-sighted move that may haunt a group of people who claim to be the party of moral clarity. And for all their positivity, Democrats are still more or less a coin flip from another catastrophe in November, and a new wave of recriminations and soul-searching.
For Democrats, the future is promising but uncertain. But they have, at least, finally left the past behind.
If you did a word cloud diagram of the Democratic convention in Chicago, the two big words that appear would be “freedom” and “joy.” Less prominent, if it showed up at all, would be “progressive.” Yet the Democrats spent four long nights deploying the attractive concepts of freedom and joy to sell a progressive agenda to voters. Moreover, with the ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, the Ds have bolstered this pitch by marrying coastal liberalism with prairie progressivism. This union offers a powerful punch to the party’s core message: Government ought to be proactively deployed to address the problems and challenges Americans face.
When Vice President Harris two weeks ago chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her campaign partner, there was much obvious commentary that he provided from-the-heartland balance to her California lineage and that his white-guy-dad-plaid-coach persona complemented her Black-Indian-Jamaican-woman identity. What drew less attention was how Walz’s selection reinforced the ideology and values message of the ticket. He and Harris are both progressive-minded politicians, but they hail from culturally different strains of liberalism.
Harris, more or less, represents what many folks these days think of as a liberal. She’s from the Bay Area. She’s a person of color. She talks about helping marginalized communities and seeking economic justice. She crusades for abortion rights and LGBTQ rights. Her days as a prosecutor have caused some conflict with the left. But in general she fits the familiar mode—a Big City Lib, a Blue State Lib. There’s a reason why Donald Trump and JD Vance believe they can score points by falsely branding her a crazy “communist.” Not a real American, in their view.
Walz is not an easy-to-attack caricature. Nebraska-born, he’s a hunter and a former National Guard noncommissioned officer. He ice fishes. He wears flannel shirts. He could be in a truck commercial. And, yes, he coached high school football—and middle-school track and basketball—in a very red district, where he won his first election to Congress in 2006.
Yet as governor, Walz has assembled an impressive progressive record. He signed into law a measure that made abortion a “fundamental right” and guaranteed access to contraception, fertility treatments, sterilization, and other reproductive health care. Having been an advocate of gay rights as a high school teacher, he signed an executive order protecting access to gender-affirming care and a “Trans Refuge” bill that banned the enforcement of arrest warrants and extradition requests for those who traveled to Minnesota for such care. He okayed a package of gun safety measures. He approved a law implementing paid family and medical leave. He legalized recreational marijuana.
There’s more: He backed drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants. (Advocates, including business leaders, said it would lead to safer roads and a better state economy.) He restored voting rights for former felons. He expanded access to health insurance, took steps to reduce the cost of prescription drugs, imposed stricter regulations on pollutants, and promoted electric vehicles. He signed a measure to provide free breakfast and lunch to all public school children.
This is a list that these days might be equated with Blue State politicians. Yet Walz represents a long tradition of prairie progressivism.
Long before the nation’s political map ossified into Blue and Red territory, there was a vibrant history of Democratic and Republican progressivism in the Midwest. The National Grange, founded after the Civil War, lobbied for progressive measures to aid farmers and others. William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska thrice ran for president as a fiery populist Democrat assailing corporate power. (He later became an anti-evolution crank.) Robert La Follette, a progressive and populist Republican, served as governor of Wisconsin and then a senator. He ran for president in 1924 to break up “the private monopoly system over the political and economic life of the American people” and proposed a host of what now would be called liberal initiatives: pro-union laws, civil liberties protections, a prohibition on child labor, government ownership of railroads and electric utilities, and easy credit for farmers (He won 16.6 percent of the popular vote as a third-party candidate.)
Later in the 20th century, the Midwest produced a roster of progressive Democratic senators, including Frank Church (Idaho), Birch Bayh (Indiana), John Culver (Iowa), George McGovern (South Dakota), and Gaylord Nelson (Wisconsin), the founder of Earth Day. (This batch were wiped out during the 1980 election that landed Ronald Reagan in the White House) And today’s Minnesota Democratic Party is officially known as the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (or DFL) and is the result of the 1944 merger between the state’s Democrats and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, a left-wing party that had tried to fuse the interests of rural farmers and urban laborers. The late Sen. Paul Wellstone, first elected in 1990, was a perfect symbol of the DFL. (A training camp established in Wellstone’s name after he died in a plane crash in 2002 helped Walz launch his first congressional campaign.)
Walz, now the leader of the DFL in Minnesota, is fully in sync with this legacy of prairie progressivism, which does overlap significantly with Big City liberalism. The difference may be in how key values and ideas are presented. For a long time, Democratic politicians have tiptoed around the issue of abortion, even when fully supporting reproductive rights. As Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) told my colleague Abby Vesoulis this week, “For many years, people wouldn’t even say the word abortion out loud.” That’s clearly changing, with this Democratic convention full of explicit references to the procedure and citing the right to an abortion as a bedrock element of freedom. And Walz has embraced abortion rights with talk about as plain as it can be. As he put it in his acceptance speech in Chicago, “In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make. And even if we wouldn’t make those same choices for ourselves, we’ve got a golden rule: Mind your own damn business. And that includes IVF and fertility treatments.” This is taking a supposed heartland value—respecting neighbors—and applying it to a contentious issue.
Walz is unapologetic about his liberalism in a football-coach sort of way. He knows that right-wingers have attacked his school meal program as they do with many progressive proposals, deriding it as expensive big government spending. Here’s how he non-defensively defended it during that address at the convention: “And we made sure that every kid in our state gets breakfast and lunch every day. So while other states were banning books from their schools, we were banishing hunger from ours.” In your face. No apologies.
For years—decades—Republicans have tried to stake a monopoly claim on the idea of freedom. (Cue Lee Greenwood.) But Walz, grabbing the main theme of the convention by its…well, you know, perfectly executed a jiu-jitsu move:
Freedom. When Republicans use the word freedom, they mean that the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office. Corporations — free to pollute your air and water. And banks—free to take advantage of customers. But when we Democrats talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people that you love. Freedom to make your own health care decisions. And yeah, your kids’ freedom to go to school without worrying about being shot dead in the hall.
As far as I can tell, there are no major policy differences between this veep candidate and the woman who picked him. (On the GOP side, JD Vance, a few years ago, was a Never-Trumper who compared his future running-mate to Hitler and who said some Trump backers were “racists” who voted for Trump for “racist reasons.”) And their publicly stated values are the same.
Toward the end of his speech, Walz expressed his goals. “We’ll build a country where workers come first, health care and housing are human rights, and the government stays the hell out of your bedroom.That’s how we make America a place where no child is left hungry. Where no community is left behind. Where nobody gets told they don’t belong. That’s how we’re going to fight.”
Any Blue State lib could say the same.
Vice presidential picks often expand the reach of a ticket in terms of geography, experience, or ideology. Barrack Obama, who had only two years of service in the US Senate when he ran president, tapped Joe Biden, the veteran legislator. Trump, a wild-card candidate, recruited Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, a well-known Republican who some (foolishly) thought could be a reassuring figure. With Walz, Harris has amplified and diversified her message—and that of the Democratic Party.
When Harris delivered her big speech on Thursday night, she eloquently and fiercely reiterated her progressive stances on reproductive freedom, LGBTQ rights, gun safety, affordable housing, expanded health care access, climate change, taxes, and other matters, as she slammed Trump for being both “deeply unserious” and dangerous. There was nothing surprising in these policy statements. But one of the big accomplishments of the convention—which hit the mark on so many fronts—was to expand and bolster the progressive vision of the Democratic Party. With the Harris-Walz ticket, the Democrats have achieved both a synergy and a unity of purpose. In what will be a helluva fight over the next 10 weeks, this will afford them a clearer shot in the battle for joy and freedom.
On Wednesday night, Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, addressed the Democratic National Convention. Unsurprisingly, cameras cut to Walz’s family—his wife, Gwen, his daughter, Hope, and his son, Gus.
A few weeks ago, Walz spoke to People about his son, including his life with a non-verbal learning disability, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and clinical anxiety. It is not clear how Gus’ symptoms affect him, but some people with ADHD experience sensory overload, which could make an environment like the DNC even more overwhelming. (This year, as the 19th reported, the DNC has made noise-cancelling headphones available for those with noise-sensory issues.)
During his father’s speech, Gus was emotional —normal for anyone proud of a parent’s big moment, whether they are neurodivergent or neurotypical. On social media, the right’s response to Gus’ expressions and emotions has been really weird: just go to any replies to videos featuring Gus at the event. Even Ann Coulter chimed in with a tweet she then deleted:
"To prove that people like me aren't the weird ones, I — a 62 year-old woman — am going to bully a 17-year-old for crying out of love for his father" pic.twitter.com/DEcSTNVeMv
In another since-deleted tweet, talk radio host Jay Weber tried to parody Tim Walz, tweeting, “Meet my son Gus. He’s a blubbering bitch boy. His mother and I are very proud.” Weber later said that he deleted his tweet after learning that Gus was disabled—he just meant to attack a 17-year-old boy for being emotional.(Weber has since deleted his explanatory tweet as well.)
Jay Weber has since deleted this post, but sinking to the level of calling the disabled minor son of Tim Walz a “blubbering bitch boy” is definitely one of the most heinous things I have ever encountered on this site.
This isn’t even the sole moment of right-wing weirdness about people with disabilities being spotlighted at the convention. On Monday, the right also attacked Brian Wallach, co-founder of ALS nonprofit I Am ALS, who spoke at the DNC and lives with the condition.
Shyamala Gopalan Harris did not believe in coddling. Pay her daughters, Kamala and Maya, an allowance for doing chores? “For what? I give you food. I give you rent,” scoffed the woman who would someday launch a million coconut memes. “If you do the dishes, you should get two dollars? You ate from the damn dishes!” Reward the future vice president of the United States—and possible future president—for getting decent grades? Ridiculous. “What does that tell you?” her mother chided as if I had disagreed. (I didn’t.) “It says, ‘You know, I really thought you were stupid. Oh, you surprised Mommy!’ No.”
When the breast cancer researcher and single mother had to work in her lab on the weekends, her daughters went with her, like it or not. “I’m not going to get a babysitter,” Dr. Harris laughed between bites of an utterly unmemorable salad at a downtown San Francisco bistro.
It’s been 17 years since I interviewed Kamala Harris’ mother, and 15 years since she died from colon cancer at the age of 70. I met her back in 2007, when I was an editor and writer at San Francisco magazine profiling her daughter—the city’s popular district attorney, who was running for reelection. Kamala was also helping her still-largely-unknown friend, the first-term Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, in his race for president. In a city that churned out political superstars—Pelosi, Feinstein, Newsom, Jerry and Willie Brown—Kamala Harris stood out for all the reasons she has energized previously dispirited Democrats as she hit the campaign trail this summer. She was sharp, empathetic, self-assured, funny. Highly polished but not too slick. The child of immigrants, she looked like the future. Her policies sounded like the future, too, progressive enough for her most liberal constituents but commonsense enough to appeal to the moderates who also wanted to feel safe.
Everyone told me, if you truly want to understand who Kamala Harris is and how she got that way, you need to talk to her mother. I wrangled a meeting with Dr. Harris, then a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She arrived at the restaurant off Union Square freshly manicured and coiffed, a ferocious bundle of energy and opinions in a tiny frame. If I wanted to know what made Kamala Harris tick, I could see it in this formidable woman—the same piercing intelligence, the same easy laughter, the same withering side-eye.
During that long-ago lunch, Harris’ mother explained why she hauled her two daughters, then still in elementary school, to her lab. “I had to go, we had to go,” she said. “And when they got there, I would make them do something”—maybe label test tubes or help with one of her experiments involving sex hormones and tumors. None of this did much to encourage artsy Kamala’s interest in science, though thanks to her mother she can knit, embroider, and crochet. “She painted, she drew, she did all kinds of stuff,” her mother recalled. “They couldn’t watch TV unless they did something with their hands—even though I controlled the shows as well.”
The contradictions of the 2007 Kamala Harris intrigued me: A 42-year-old Black and brown woman from the scruffy Berkeley-Oakland flats whose political rise was largely financed by rich white Pacific Heights socialites. A die-hard career prosecutor who often sounded like a social justice warrior. A wannabe thought leader whose brand was “smart on crime,” yet who squandered much of her early political capital by opposing the death penalty for a cop-killer. Harris was also maddeningly elusive, friendly and open even as she firmly latched the door and pulled down the shades on anything remotely private. All of which left me wondering: Who was this person? How could I distinguish the appealing packaging from the authentic self?
Shyamala Gopalan Harris and Donald Harris, Kamala’s parents.
Shyamala holds the hands of her young daughter Kamala.
I could ask her mother.
Since our conversation,Shyamala’s daughter has been California’s attorney general, a US Senator, a failed presidential candidate, the vice president, and now the first woman of color to be nominated by a major political party for president. Throughout, she has often referred to her mother as her greatest influence and her True North. Shyamala and her aphorisms have become part of the Harris mystique—consider the famous coconut story that’s all over TikTok. Harris was delivering remarks at a White House swearing-in ceremony for Hispanic leaders in May 2023 when she veered into one of those earnest tangents that I remember from her San Francisco days, reaching into her trove of goofy-momisms and pulling out zinger. “My mother used to—she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people,” Harris recounted with a laugh. “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’”
I’m not sure what the vice president was talking about, though it had something to do with communities and context. I do know that it sounded exactly like something her mother would say. What I heard was love and yearning, a daughter honoring the person who, perhaps more than anyone else, helped shape her into what she has become, but who wasn’t there to see how it had all turned out. After Harris secured the presidential nomination, I started going through my computer files and came upon a transcript of my conversation with her mother. In rereading it, I realized that now, when millions of Americans may have the same questions I had all those years ago, revisiting my visit with Shyamala might provide some meaningful clues.
Shyamala, center, stands behind Kamala Harris and her younger daughter, Maya, during a visit by her parents from India. Courtesy Kamala Harris Campaign
Shyamala Gopalan was raised in a progressive Brahmin family in southeast India in which everyone was expected to earn an advanced degree and have a high-achieving career in public service. Her father, once part of the Indian movement to gain independence, was a civil servant and diplomat. Her mother, betrothed at age 12, became a fierce feminist, sometimes taking to the streets with a bullhorn to talk to poor women about accessing birth control, Kamala later wrote. Having children whose professional lives were not focused on making money was a point of pride for Shyamala’s father. “Teachers, doctors, lawyers—these are supposed to be service professions,” Dr. Harris told me. “When you make money on people who require legal and medical help, you are taking advantage of the very vulnerable. That’s tacky.”
Coddling was out of the question. In 1958, after graduating from college in Delhi at 19, Shyamala headed to the University of California at Berkeley to earn her doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology. “My father just put me on a plane. There was not a soul I knew in the entire place. My family has done that with everybody—my sister, my brother, It was all normal.” After she completed her studies, the assumption was that she’d return to an arranged marriage in India.
But as Berkeley became the center of the Free Speech and anti–Vietnam War movements, that changed. Shyamala fell in love with a fellow grad student and activist, Jamaican-born Donald Harris, who eventually became an economics professor at Stanford. The birth of their daughters—Kamala in 1964, Maya in 1967—did not hinder Shyamala’s studies. She earned her PhD the same year Kamala was born and was working in her lab when her water broke. Should a political rally demand their attention, she and Harris strapped the girls into their strollers and took them along. In her 2018 book The Truths We Hold, Kamala tells the story of when she was a fussy toddler and her mother tried to soothe her. “What do you want?” Shyamala pleaded. “Fweedom!!!” Kamala supposedly replied.
After the couple’s 1971 divorce, Shyamala and the girls could have settled into one of the area’s vibrant South Asian enclaves. Instead, they gravitated to predominantly Black neighborhoods in Berkeley and Oakland. “I raised them in an African-American community, for a very special reason,” Shyamala told me: racism. “It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if your color comes from India or African Americans, because this country is racist based on color.” Her children’s Indian identity was secure. Rooting them in the Bay Area’s Black community was an act of pride and protection, connecting them to the civil rights movement’s rich history but also schooling them in “what they need to know…to maneuver [in this country].” She added, “I’m the one who told them to do all that.”
“One of the first rules I taught my children is, don’t let anybody tell you who you are. You tell them who you are.”
Shyamala would not have been at all surprised by Donald Trump’s attacks on her daughter’s racial identity—he was exactly the kind of person she was teaching her children to stand up to—or by Harris’ deft dismissals of someone she considered beneath contempt.“If you don’t define yourself, people will try to define you,” Shyamala told me. “One of the first rules I taught my children is, don’t let anybody tell you who you are. You tell them who you are.”
Thanks to their far-flung extended family, her girls had many opportunities to escape the stultifying American attitudes towards race and gender. “When Kamala was in first grade,” Shyamala recalled, “one of her teachers said to me, ‘You know, your child has a great imagination. Every time we talk about someplace in the world she says, Oh, I’ve been there.’” Shyamala quickly set the teacher straight: “‘Well, she has been there!’ India, England, the Caribbean, Africa—she had been there.” In their travels, and in the examples of the matriarchs in their own family, Kamala and her sister saw something that, in America of the 1960s and ’70s, was relatively rare: women wielding power.
Another Shyamala life lesson: Don’t just sit on the sidelines and complain, and definitely don’t expect anyone to come to your rescue. In a 2007 interview for my profile, Harris told me that from the time she was little, “I’d come home with a problem, ‘Oh, Mommy, this happened, that happened.’” Instead of consoling her, “my mother’s first response was always, ‘What did you do?’” The young Kamala hated this. “You’re not coming to my defense! I want a mother to come to my defense!” Later she felt empowered. “If you can see where you fit into a problem, you can figure out where you could fit into a solution,” Harris told me. Perhaps as a result, she said, “I love problems, because they’re an opportunity to fix something— there’s nothing more gratifying.”
When I shared what her daughter had said, Dr. Harris offered a slightly different spin. “I wanted to know the situation. Always,” she confirmed. “But I’m not going to put on a Band-Aid when I don’t even know what the problem is. Because it could be a problem for a Band-Aid or it could be a problem for a [bigger] treatment.” And lest I missed her deeper motivation, she added, “I also think that it is patronizing from a mother’s point of view to underestimate the intelligence and the resilience of children.”
Dr. Harris brought the same tough love to the many students she mentored over the years. “It’s a very simple rule: You would not be in my lab unless I thought you were good,” she said. “Because I don’t believe in charity.” She believed they could succeed at whatever she threw at them, so they usually did. But not always. “My bottom line is just do it, and if you fall, I’ll pick you up. Because when else are you going to have this opportunity?” She could not abide young people being ruled by their laziness, or insecurity. “I’m not doing this because I’m being given millions of dollars to do this. It’s my time. And because my time is worth a lot of money, and I’m putting that time into you, you got to understand how good I think you are!” This, by the way, is the same hard-ass attitude her daughter has displayed as a boss and mentor—one of the reasons she’s sometimes been called “difficult” to work with. (Her mother’s description was “really strict.”) When it came to their expectations of the people around them, Shyamala said, they both wanted “the good stuff.”
Around 1976, Dr. Harris got a job at a research hospital at McGill University and moved the girls, then 12 and nine, to Montreal. Kamala hated being uprooted, but eventually she made some good friends. One of the recurring stories she tells is about what happened when she discovered that one of them was being molested by her father. “I said, ‘You have to come live with us.’ My mother said, ‘Absolutely.’”
Kamala Harris with her mother.Courtesy Kamala Harris Campaign
Kamala had long known she wanted to be a lawyer like her idol, Thurgood Marshall, attending Howard University like he had. Given her family’s progressive world view, the assumption was that her focus would be civil rights, perhaps as a defense attorney. (Years later, her sister and close adviser Maya Harris headed the Northern California office of the ACLU.) But after returning to the Bay Area for law school, Kamala surprised her mother by announcingshe wanted to become a prosecutor and champion victims like her high school friend. “She told me, ‘If you’ve not been unjustly prosecuted, you don’t need a very hot-shot defense lawyer, do you? That is only necessary when the prosecutor doesn’t do their job.’” Kamala insisted she would be a different kind of prosecutor—one who understood that “a criminal is much more than the crime he or she commits,” Dr. Harris said. “Crime in a society doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Therefore you have to integrate law enforcement in the context of the society.” When you lose sight of the context, she said, “you lose sight of humanity.”
Then she launched into a story—another entry in the Kamala canon—about her daughter’s first job in the Alameda County DA’s office, which includes Oakland. An innocent bystander, a woman with kids, had been rounded up during a drug bust. If the woman didn’t get out that day, she’d be stuck in jail all weekend. Harris spent the afternoon looking for someone to approve the woman’s release, finally plunking herself down in a courtroom until the judge relented and signed the necessary paperwork. As Shyamala recalled it, Kamala was particularly distraught by the potential impact on the woman’s kids. “Because they are the future,” Shyamala said. “You don’t destroy them.”
“And people here think it is such a big deal that they’re going to nominate a woman?Please! I’m supposed to be impressed by that? No, I’m not.”
In 2007, campaign season was already in full swing and the Democratic frontrunner was Hillary Clinton. Shyamala didn’t have much to say about the presidential race, other than to grumble that the idea of a woman leading the ticket was hardly worth the hoopla. India’s Indira Gandhi had served as prime minister for almost 15 years. What about Margaret Thatcher? “And people here think it is such a big deal that they’re going to nominate a woman?” Dr. Harris said dismissively. “Please! I’m supposed to be impressed by that? No, I’m not.” As for Obama, who’d visited the Bay Area to fundraise with Kamala, “I didn’t spend that much time with him,” Shyamala told me. “He’s a great guy, but I don’t know him enough. But on my limited exposure to him, there is nothing about him that offends me.” If that seemed like faint praise—well, that’s who she was. “Anybody will tell you, I am not that easily impressed about anything.”
And now, former Secretary of State Clinton, and former President Obama, have given soaring speeches at the Democratic National Convention in praise of Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential standard bearer. In November, Shyamala Harris’s oldest daughter could become this country’s first woman president.
In our long-ago conversation, it didn’t occur to me to ask Dr. Harris about the very American myth that anyone can grow up to be president. But it doesn’t sound like something she would have believed. Certainly she never pushed her daughters in any particular direction, with any particular goal. “To some extent, I believe that life takes you,” she told me, waxing philosophical. “You let life take you without putting up enormous resistance.”
All Shyamala Harris wanted to do was to give her girls the emotional tools—toughness and discipline and a deep-down belief in themselves that came from knowing they were truly loved—to take on whatever life threw at them. In that, she seems to have succeeded. “What my children tend to do, I have noticed, is when they see a challenge in front of them and they feel they can take it, they will go for it,” she said proudly. “Because [if] you’re affirmed in that manner, you think, ‘I’m not going to be afraid…. I can do this.’”
On Wednesday night, Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, addressed the Democratic National Convention. Unsurprisingly, cameras cut to Walz’s family—his wife, Gwen, his daughter, Hope, and his son, Gus.
A few weeks ago, Walz spoke to People about his son, including his life with a non-verbal learning disability, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and clinical anxiety. It is not clear how Gus’ symptoms affect him, but some people with ADHD experience sensory overload, which could make an environment like the DNC even more overwhelming. (This year, as the 19th reported, the DNC has made noise-cancelling headphones available for those with noise-sensory issues.)
During his father’s speech, Gus was emotional —normal for anyone proud of a parent’s big moment, whether they are neurodivergent or neurotypical. On social media, the right’s response to Gus’ expressions and emotions has been really weird: just go to any replies to videos featuring Gus at the event. Even Ann Coulter chimed in with a tweet she then deleted:
"To prove that people like me aren't the weird ones, I — a 62 year-old woman — am going to bully a 17-year-old for crying out of love for his father" pic.twitter.com/DEcSTNVeMv
In another since-deleted tweet, talk radio host Jay Weber tried to parody Tim Walz, tweeting, “Meet my son Gus. He’s a blubbering bitch boy. His mother and I are very proud.” Weber later said that he deleted his tweet after learning that Gus was disabled—he just meant to attack a 17-year-old boy for being emotional.(Weber has since deleted his explanatory tweet as well.)
Jay Weber has since deleted this post, but sinking to the level of calling the disabled minor son of Tim Walz a “blubbering bitch boy” is definitely one of the most heinous things I have ever encountered on this site.
This isn’t even the sole moment of right-wing weirdness about people with disabilities being spotlighted at the convention. On Monday, the right also attacked Brian Wallach, co-founder of ALS nonprofit I Am ALS, who spoke at the DNC and lives with the condition.
Shyamala Gopalan Harris did not believe in coddling. Pay her daughters, Kamala and Maya, an allowance for doing chores? “For what? I give you food. I give you rent,” scoffed the woman who would someday launch a million coconut memes. “If you do the dishes, you should get two dollars? You ate from the damn dishes!” Reward the future vice president of the United States—and possible future president—for getting decent grades? Ridiculous. “What does that tell you?” her mother chided as if I had disagreed. (I didn’t.) “It says, ‘You know, I really thought you were stupid. Oh, you surprised Mommy!’ No.”
When the breast cancer researcher and single mother had to work in her lab on the weekends, her daughters went with her, like it or not. “I’m not going to get a babysitter,” Dr. Harris laughed between bites of an utterly unmemorable salad at a downtown San Francisco bistro.
It’s been 17 years since I interviewed Kamala Harris’ mother, and 15 years since she died from colon cancer at the age of 70. I met her back in 2007, when I was an editor and writer at San Francisco magazine profiling her daughter—the city’s popular district attorney, who was running for reelection. Kamala was also helping her still-largely-unknown friend, the first-term Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, in his race for president. In a city that churned out political superstars—Pelosi, Feinstein, Newsom, Jerry and Willie Brown—Kamala Harris stood out for all the reasons she has energized previously dispirited Democrats as she hit the campaign trail this summer. She was sharp, empathetic, self-assured, funny. Highly polished but not too slick. The child of immigrants, she looked like the future. Her policies sounded like the future, too, progressive enough for her most liberal constituents but commonsense enough to appeal to the moderates who also wanted to feel safe.
Everyone told me, if you truly want to understand who Kamala Harris is and how she got that way, you need to talk to her mother. I wrangled a meeting with Dr. Harris, then a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She arrived at the restaurant off Union Square freshly manicured and coiffed, a ferocious bundle of energy and opinions in a tiny frame. If I wanted to know what made Kamala Harris tick, I could see it in this formidable woman—the same piercing intelligence, the same easy laughter, the same withering side-eye.
During that long-ago lunch, Harris’ mother explained why she hauled her two daughters, then still in elementary school, to her lab. “I had to go, we had to go,” she said. “And when they got there, I would make them do something”—maybe label test tubes or help with one of her experiments involving sex hormones and tumors. None of this did much to encourage artsy Kamala’s interest in science, though thanks to her mother she can knit, embroider, and crochet. “She painted, she drew, she did all kinds of stuff,” her mother recalled. “They couldn’t watch TV unless they did something with their hands—even though I controlled the shows as well.”
The contradictions of the 2007 Kamala Harris intrigued me: A 42-year-old Black and brown woman from the scruffy Berkeley-Oakland flats whose political rise was largely financed by rich white Pacific Heights socialites. A die-hard career prosecutor who often sounded like a social justice warrior. A wannabe thought leader whose brand was “smart on crime,” yet who squandered much of her early political capital by opposing the death penalty for a cop-killer. Harris was also maddeningly elusive, friendly and open even as she firmly latched the door and pulled down the shades on anything remotely private. All of which left me wondering: Who was this person? How could I distinguish the appealing packaging from the authentic self?
Shyamala Gopalan Harris and Donald Harris, Kamala’s parents.
Shyamala holds the hands of her young daughter Kamala.
I could ask her mother.
Since our conversation,Shyamala’s daughter has been California’s attorney general, a US Senator, a failed presidential candidate, the vice president, and now the first woman of color to be nominated by a major political party for president. Throughout, she has often referred to her mother as her greatest influence and her True North. Shyamala and her aphorisms have become part of the Harris mystique—consider the famous coconut story that’s all over TikTok. Harris was delivering remarks at a White House swearing-in ceremony for Hispanic leaders in May 2023 when she veered into one of those earnest tangents that I remember from her San Francisco days, reaching into her trove of goofy-momisms and pulling out zinger. “My mother used to—she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people,” Harris recounted with a laugh. “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’”
I’m not sure what the vice president was talking about, though it had something to do with communities and context. I do know that it sounded exactly like something her mother would say. What I heard was love and yearning, a daughter honoring the person who, perhaps more than anyone else, helped shape her into what she has become, but who wasn’t there to see how it had all turned out. After Harris secured the presidential nomination, I started going through my computer files and came upon a transcript of my conversation with her mother. In rereading it, I realized that now, when millions of Americans may have the same questions I had all those years ago, revisiting my visit with Shyamala might provide some meaningful clues.
Shyamala, center, stands behind Kamala Harris and her younger daughter, Maya, during a visit by her parents from India. Courtesy Kamala Harris Campaign
Shyamala Gopalan was raised in a progressive Brahmin family in southeast India in which everyone was expected to earn an advanced degree and have a high-achieving career in public service. Her father, once part of the Indian movement to gain independence, was a civil servant and diplomat. Her mother, betrothed at age 12, became a fierce feminist, sometimes taking to the streets with a bullhorn to talk to poor women about accessing birth control, Kamala later wrote. Having children whose professional lives were not focused on making money was a point of pride for Shyamala’s father. “Teachers, doctors, lawyers—these are supposed to be service professions,” Dr. Harris told me. “When you make money on people who require legal and medical help, you are taking advantage of the very vulnerable. That’s tacky.”
Coddling was out of the question. In 1958, after graduating from college in Delhi at 19, Shyamala headed to the University of California at Berkeley to earn her doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology. “My father just put me on a plane. There was not a soul I knew in the entire place. My family has done that with everybody—my sister, my brother, It was all normal.” After she completed her studies, the assumption was that she’d return to an arranged marriage in India.
But as Berkeley became the center of the Free Speech and anti–Vietnam War movements, that changed. Shyamala fell in love with a fellow grad student and activist, Jamaican-born Donald Harris, who eventually became an economics professor at Stanford. The birth of their daughters—Kamala in 1964, Maya in 1967—did not hinder Shyamala’s studies. She earned her PhD the same year Kamala was born and was working in her lab when her water broke. Should a political rally demand their attention, she and Harris strapped the girls into their strollers and took them along. In her 2018 book The Truths We Hold, Kamala tells the story of when she was a fussy toddler and her mother tried to soothe her. “What do you want?” Shyamala pleaded. “Fweedom!!!” Kamala supposedly replied.
After the couple’s 1971 divorce, Shyamala and the girls could have settled into one of the area’s vibrant South Asian enclaves. Instead, they gravitated to predominantly Black neighborhoods in Berkeley and Oakland. “I raised them in an African-American community, for a very special reason,” Shyamala told me: racism. “It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if your color comes from India or African Americans, because this country is racist based on color.” Her children’s Indian identity was secure. Rooting them in the Bay Area’s Black community was an act of pride and protection, connecting them to the civil rights movement’s rich history but also schooling them in “what they need to know…to maneuver [in this country].” She added, “I’m the one who told them to do all that.”
“One of the first rules I taught my children is, don’t let anybody tell you who you are. You tell them who you are.”
Shyamala would not have been at all surprised by Donald Trump’s attacks on her daughter’s racial identity—he was exactly the kind of person she was teaching her children to stand up to—or by Harris’ deft dismissals of someone she considered beneath contempt.“If you don’t define yourself, people will try to define you,” Shyamala told me. “One of the first rules I taught my children is, don’t let anybody tell you who you are. You tell them who you are.”
Thanks to their far-flung extended family, her girls had many opportunities to escape the stultifying American attitudes towards race and gender. “When Kamala was in first grade,” Shyamala recalled, “one of her teachers said to me, ‘You know, your child has a great imagination. Every time we talk about someplace in the world she says, Oh, I’ve been there.’” Shyamala quickly set the teacher straight: “‘Well, she has been there!’ India, England, the Caribbean, Africa—she had been there.” In their travels, and in the examples of the matriarchs in their own family, Kamala and her sister saw something that, in America of the 1960s and ’70s, was relatively rare: women wielding power.
Another Shyamala life lesson: Don’t just sit on the sidelines and complain, and definitely don’t expect anyone to come to your rescue. In a 2007 interview for my profile, Harris told me that from the time she was little, “I’d come home with a problem, ‘Oh, Mommy, this happened, that happened.’” Instead of consoling her, “my mother’s first response was always, ‘What did you do?’” The young Kamala hated this. “You’re not coming to my defense! I want a mother to come to my defense!” Later she felt empowered. “If you can see where you fit into a problem, you can figure out where you could fit into a solution,” Harris told me. Perhaps as a result, she said, “I love problems, because they’re an opportunity to fix something— there’s nothing more gratifying.”
When I shared what her daughter had said, Dr. Harris offered a slightly different spin. “I wanted to know the situation. Always,” she confirmed. “But I’m not going to put on a Band-Aid when I don’t even know what the problem is. Because it could be a problem for a Band-Aid or it could be a problem for a [bigger] treatment.” And lest I missed her deeper motivation, she added, “I also think that it is patronizing from a mother’s point of view to underestimate the intelligence and the resilience of children.”
Dr. Harris brought the same tough love to the many students she mentored over the years. “It’s a very simple rule: You would not be in my lab unless I thought you were good,” she said. “Because I don’t believe in charity.” She believed they could succeed at whatever she threw at them, so they usually did. But not always. “My bottom line is just do it, and if you fall, I’ll pick you up. Because when else are you going to have this opportunity?” She could not abide young people being ruled by their laziness, or insecurity. “I’m not doing this because I’m being given millions of dollars to do this. It’s my time. And because my time is worth a lot of money, and I’m putting that time into you, you got to understand how good I think you are!” This, by the way, is the same hard-ass attitude her daughter has displayed as a boss and mentor—one of the reasons she’s sometimes been called “difficult” to work with. (Her mother’s description was “really strict.”) When it came to their expectations of the people around them, Shyamala said, they both wanted “the good stuff.”
Around 1976, Dr. Harris got a job at a research hospital at McGill University and moved the girls, then 12 and nine, to Montreal. Kamala hated being uprooted, but eventually she made some good friends. One of the recurring stories she tells is about what happened when she discovered that one of them was being molested by her father. “I said, ‘You have to come live with us.’ My mother said, ‘Absolutely.’”
Kamala Harris with her mother.Courtesy Kamala Harris Campaign
Kamala had long known she wanted to be a lawyer like her idol, Thurgood Marshall, attending Howard University like he had. Given her family’s progressive world view, the assumption was that her focus would be civil rights, perhaps as a defense attorney. (Years later, her sister and close adviser Maya Harris headed the Northern California office of the ACLU.) But after returning to the Bay Area for law school, Kamala surprised her mother by announcingshe wanted to become a prosecutor and champion victims like her high school friend. “She told me, ‘If you’ve not been unjustly prosecuted, you don’t need a very hot-shot defense lawyer, do you? That is only necessary when the prosecutor doesn’t do their job.’” Kamala insisted she would be a different kind of prosecutor—one who understood that “a criminal is much more than the crime he or she commits,” Dr. Harris said. “Crime in a society doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Therefore you have to integrate law enforcement in the context of the society.” When you lose sight of the context, she said, “you lose sight of humanity.”
Then she launched into a story—another entry in the Kamala canon—about her daughter’s first job in the Alameda County DA’s office, which includes Oakland. An innocent bystander, a woman with kids, had been rounded up during a drug bust. If the woman didn’t get out that day, she’d be stuck in jail all weekend. Harris spent the afternoon looking for someone to approve the woman’s release, finally plunking herself down in a courtroom until the judge relented and signed the necessary paperwork. As Shyamala recalled it, Kamala was particularly distraught by the potential impact on the woman’s kids. “Because they are the future,” Shyamala said. “You don’t destroy them.”
“And people here think it is such a big deal that they’re going to nominate a woman?Please! I’m supposed to be impressed by that? No, I’m not.”
In 2007, campaign season was already in full swing and the Democratic frontrunner was Hillary Clinton. Shyamala didn’t have much to say about the presidential race, other than to grumble that the idea of a woman leading the ticket was hardly worth the hoopla. India’s Indira Gandhi had served as prime minister for almost 15 years. What about Margaret Thatcher? “And people here think it is such a big deal that they’re going to nominate a woman?” Dr. Harris said dismissively. “Please! I’m supposed to be impressed by that? No, I’m not.” As for Obama, who’d visited the Bay Area to fundraise with Kamala, “I didn’t spend that much time with him,” Shyamala told me. “He’s a great guy, but I don’t know him enough. But on my limited exposure to him, there is nothing about him that offends me.” If that seemed like faint praise—well, that’s who she was. “Anybody will tell you, I am not that easily impressed about anything.”
And now, former Secretary of State Clinton, and former President Obama, have given soaring speeches at the Democratic National Convention in praise of Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential standard bearer. In November, Shyamala Harris’s oldest daughter could become this country’s first woman president.
In our long-ago conversation, it didn’t occur to me to ask Dr. Harris about the very American myth that anyone can grow up to be president. But it doesn’t sound like something she would have believed. Certainly she never pushed her daughters in any particular direction, with any particular goal. “To some extent, I believe that life takes you,” she told me, waxing philosophical. “You let life take you without putting up enormous resistance.”
All Shyamala Harris wanted to do was to give her girls the emotional tools—toughness and discipline and a deep-down belief in themselves that came from knowing they were truly loved—to take on whatever life threw at them. In that, she seems to have succeeded. “What my children tend to do, I have noticed, is when they see a challenge in front of them and they feel they can take it, they will go for it,” she said proudly. “Because [if] you’re affirmed in that manner, you think, ‘I’m not going to be afraid…. I can do this.’”
At a Tuesday panel dedicated to “Protecting the Vote” at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, an expert speaker sounded as if he was holding back tears as he explained what motivates him to do the work.
His wife gave birth to a son just two weeks ago, he shared. Suddenly, his job wasn’t just about protecting democracy for the country, but also for his newborn. “I have to fight for his ability to continue to be a respected member of his community and a citizen of his country in a full way,” said Jake Kenswil, director of voter protection at the Democratic National Committee.
“This subject is emotional for us,” said Yvette Lewis, another speaker and the former chair of the Maryland Democratic Party. “What we need you to do is to be just as emotional when you’re talking to your communities,” she added, “and get them to feel what we hope we made you feel today—which is the urgency of why this is so very important.”
But there weren’t many people there to hear their pressing message. In a conference room that could have accommodated hundreds, less than 40 people showed; out of two dozen press-reserved seats, only one was filled (mine). The sparsely attended meeting hosted by Democratic legal experts belies the tremendous threat to voter confidence proliferating this cycle: Deepfake videos projecting fictitious messages from seemingly real officials. Disingenuous lawsuits amplifying debunked theories of fraud. Widespread challenges to voter rolls. Stricter laws on voter identification documentation. Plus, a torrent of requests and threats to local election workers trying to hold down the fort through all of the tumult.
“We have a lot of work to do to prepare for early voting, to ensure our elections are secure, [and] to protect the accuracy of our laws,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told me the following day. “And every minute we spend worrying or thinking about planning to protect against these threats is a minute that’s taken away from our ability to do our jobs.”
Wendy Weiser, vice president of the Brennan Center for Justice, has a theory on the event’s low attendance Tuesday: “Lawyers are boring,” she, a lawyer herself, quipped at a separate event on Wednesday. Moreover, elected officials and election security experts have some trust in reforms that have occurred since President Donald Trump’s supporters infamously broke into the Capitol to overthrow the 2020 election on January 6, 2021.
“There is no legitimate loophole through which somebody can steal an election. It is actually illegal to throw out legitimate votes. It is illegal to reject certification. It is illegal to try to thwart a congressional count,” she said, pointing to the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act, which raised the threshold for members of Congress to challenge the Electoral College and clarified the role of the vice president in election certification.
That being said, with significant progress on protecting the sanctity of elections has come more aggressive tactics to undermine it. “There’s been a strengthening of safeguards,” Weiser said. “There’s also been an increase in risk level.”
In the spring, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump went on conservative cable news channel Newsmax to talk about the GOP’s efforts to ensure her father-in-law, former President Trump, is pleased with the election outcome in November.
“We have lawsuits in 81 states right now,” she said. Late-night television talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel was quick to mock her slip-up on elementary-level geography. “Not just Tennessee, eleven-essee, twelve-essee,” Kimmel joked about the impossible number of states. “West Dakota, South Virginia. Indiana, Out-diana, you name it—they’re suing.”
The RNC says it is already involved in at least 78 election-related lawsuits in 23 states, often working with white-shoe law firms—including Consovoy McCarthy, which employs multiple former clerks to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who may eventually be called upon to hear the merits of some of the cases. Several of them focus on longtime GOP bugaboos, like signature verification laws and absentee voting protocols. Others are dressed-up versions of Trump’s wilder conspiracies, including his claim that a “tremendous number of dead people” cast ballots in 2020. Importantly, the buckshot legal onslaught is preemptive, not defensive, and appears intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2024 election results.
Despite the GOP’s claims repeatedly failing in courts, the lawsuits are effective in the sense that they “create smoke” before judges ultimately dismiss them, said Weiser. “They are exploiting a loophole in the system: Courts are slow.”
In our interview, Benson agreed that Republican National Committee lawsuits in Michigan—such as challenges to her state’s voter roll maintenance—are merely “an effort to drive a PR campaign, to drive a public narrative that sows seeds of distrust,” she said. “When the lawsuits ultimately get dismissed, the damage has already been done.”
Lawsuits aren’t the only weapon in the right’s arsenal. Several GOP-led states have enacted stricter voter identification laws that will increase barriers for voters who don’t possess identification for a variety of reasons. Election deniers are also running and winning positions in local election administration. Conservatives in Georgia are pushing for the ability to challenge voter registrations with limited data. And without an ounce of credible evidence, Trump also continues to insinuate there is fraud afoot, especially if he loses.
He maintains that the only way Democrats could win in 2024 is if they cheat. Therefore, he adds, his lead at the ballot box needs to be “too big to rig.” On the question of whether he will accept the 2024 results, Trump said during the June presidential debate: “If it’s a fair and legal and good election.”
Legal experts on the left are countering Trump’s steady drumbeat of lies with tactics like publishing information about election rules in multiple languages, ensuring Democrat-allied lawyers observe court hearings related to election rules, and building relationships with local election boards to build trust, the panelists explained Tuesday.
At the state level, officials are also implementing new tools to fight the second iteration of the Big Lie.
Benson shared that her office is connecting overwhelmed election officials in her state with organizations that provide free legal support. Under her leadership, Michigan has also launched a “Democracy Ambassadors” program that distributes newsletters disproving election rumors and sharing helpful facts. The state has also emboldened messengers such as religious leaders and athletes to serve as sources of credible election information.
Michigan has also held “tabletop exercises that enable scenario planning and partnership building between law enforcement, first responders and clerks, so that there’s a direct line for them to call if something happens.”
“We at our office have all the information necessary to assure voters that their votes will be safe—their votes will be counted,” she added.
Efforts to fortify trust and stability in the electoral process will hopefully ensure that the vote of Kenswil’s newborn son will also be counted…in 18 years’ time.
Rep. Maxwell Frost is the youngest US congressman—and every headline and article about him (including ours!) never fails to mention it. Hailed as the first and only (for now) Gen Z Representative, Frost rose from the ranks of activism as the national organizing director for March for Our Lives to Congress, when he was elected to represent central Florida nearly two years ago. He instantly aligned with several big progressive causes, especially ending gun violence, and joined the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He also became an outspoken defender of and campaigner for President Joe Biden. That’s come at a cost. More recently, critics singled him out for having betrayed his activist roots, accusing him of not being outspoken enough about the war in Gaza.
Having just won his primary this week, Frost is facing reelection in November and I had the chance to catch up with him in one of the DNC’s fancy “creator” spaces on the sidelines of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. During our sit-down interview, we talked about what he’s learned in his short time in Congress (it’s dysfunctional!), how to navigate big, contentious issues (it’s hard!), and what he wants to see from the Harris campaign in terms of policy (he’s very excited about housing! Not surprising when you recall his apartment-hunting headaches when he arrived in DC.)
Watch the video, and below there’sa lightly edited transcript of the conversation.
Okay, so what have you learned? What has been most surprising for you as a Congressman? And, I wanna know how you’ve changed.
Honestly, what’s been really surprising for me, is we know there’s so much dysfunction in Congress. And oftentimes, we just blame the people there for that dysfunction, so I’m gonna give them 60 percent of the blame. Forty percent, or a good chunk, actually has to do with the institution itself. I’ll give you a very small example. Orientation, when the new members first get to know each other, before we start arguing, we’re just all humans, new people to Congress. You don’t really get a lot of time to spend time with the other side of the aisle. The only time I’m with the Republicans is during the classes, and what are you supposed to do in class? Listen. The last half of the day, the social aspect, is all separated by party. So it makes sense why there’s so much dysfunction here.
Here at the DNC, we are looking forward. We have about 75, or so, days until the election. What is it that you wanna see? What kind of policies? What do you want the Harris campaign to bring forward?
“I’m really excited about the housing platform that Vice President Harris has put forth.”
I’m really excited about the housing platform that Vice President Harris has put forth. Honestly, it’s one of the first times, I think, the Democratic party has put together a housing platform that’s really exciting. What else? I’m excited to see the Vice President continue to talk about her plans around preventing the climate crisis. Obviously, the Biden-Harris administration made history and dedicated the most resources and money towards defeating the climate crisis. Not in the history of our country, but the history of the world.
The Vice President has been very vocal on gun control—an issue that’s very near and dear to you and your work. What are you hoping to see around that? And what role would you play?
I’m proud that the first bill I introduced in Congress was to create a federal office of gun violence prevention. The President took that legislation with Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and used it as the foundation for an executive order. And he created the White House Office of Violence Prevention. Who’s its leader? Vice President Kamala Harris. So, I’m excited to see her expand that office, and what I wanna see is for us to put more money toward CVI, Community Violence Intervention. These are programs, community-based, that work at identifying people most likely to be shot, and the people most likely to shoot someone. And then, they intervene at the community level. We had this program in Orlando, and gun violence has gone down in the blocks it’s operating in. And how did we get the program started? Federal money. First from the American Rescue Plan, and then from the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.
So, let’s get a personal question in here. How do you grow as a politician and a leader with all of the complex issues here that we face in this country.
“There’s so much to learn.”
Yeah, there’s so much to learn. I have 10 meetings in a day about completely different subjects. I’m gonna be honest, number one, it’s a team effort. I have a great staff that really helps educate me. There’s a lot of resources that are available to us. There’s actually something called the Congressional Research Service. I can go to my staff and say, “I want an in-depth briefing on the situation in the Congo.” And they will get our government experts to come in and give me an in-depth briefing. That information, is always the basis for me to do more research, and speak to other outside groups, as well. So we have a lot of resources we can take advantage of to educate ourselves. We’re not gonna be experts on every issue. But we should definitely try our best to educate ourselves on every issue. That way we can legislate in a better way.
We have so many issues like, why is this important? What makes it more important than something else? And it all leads us to, why is this election important?
“There are communities that won’t survive.”
This election is important because if we elect Donald Trump again, it’s not a pause in progress, it’s a rollback. And there are communities that won’t survive. That word “survival” means something different for everyone. More people will die of gun violence. He wants mass deportations of certain communities. Nothing will be done about the climate crisis. People will literally die. We’re experiencing extreme heat right now that’s killing more people than ever before. So, lives are at stake. And from the gun violence movement, my work, and my organizing has always been about saving lives. So, we gotta make sure we don’t let that guy anywhere near the White House. Kamala Harris is gonna save lives.
Congressman Frost, thank you so much for your time.
The immediate reaction to former President Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night was that it sounded a lot like the sort of remarks he’d delivered before. He asked the audience at Chicago’s United Center if they were “fired up” and rewrote his 2008 campaign mantra to accommodate the vice president: “Yes she can.” Democrats on the ground here say they’re seeing a level of excitement they haven’t witnessed since Obama’s first campaign; the former commander-in-chief was happy to indulge their newfound hope.
But there was one item on his agenda that sounded quite different from the Obama of old.
“We can’t just rely on the ideas of the past, we need to chart a new way forward to meet the challenges of today and Kamala understands this,” Obama said, as he rattled off key planks of Harris’ domestic agenda. “She knows for example that if we want to make it easier for young people to buy a home, we need to build more units—and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that made it harder to build homes for working people in this country. That is a priority, and she’s put out a bold new plan to do just that.”
Just a few years ago, if you’d asked the leading political scientists & thought leaders whether YIMBY ideas would be advanced by a figure like Obama on a national stage, they’d have laughed you. Clear evidence for the power of (correct) ideas. pic.twitter.com/GwxGFSfUw5
That’s right—the push for zoning reform has gone presidential. Obama’s lengthy convention remarks are a useful barometer for where the party stands. I checked to see if any of his previous DNC speeches had tackled the housing shortage that has squeezed low- and middle-income Americans’ finances, displaced working people, and powered a homelessness crisis in places like Los Angeles and New York City. The issue never came up in 2020 or in 2016. In 2012, in the aftermath of a severe recession triggered by a predatory mortgage lenders, Obama did talk up home construction—but only the idea of making them more environmentally friendly. In 2008, as that housing bubble was bursting, he addressed falling home values—but that’s a much different problem than an affordability crisis driven by limited supply and high demand. The idea that the government should clear the road for a massive home-construction boom was simply not the sort of thing people talked about in primetime.
“I plead guilty,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders told me this week, after praising Harris’ proposal. “It just hasn’t been as high up on the agenda as it should have been. It’s an issue that’s staring us right in the face. You know, walk two blocks away from the Capitol you have people sleeping out on the street. I talk to people who pay 50, 60-percent of their income in housing. It’s an issue that we should have dealt with, and we’ve got to be bold.”
The failure to tackle the housing crisis has recently seeped into Republican messaging, albeit in a far different way. A good deal of Trump’s narrative of “American Carnage” in largely Democratic cities is really a story about the downstream effects—things like tent cities and visible drug use. At the Republican National Convention last month, Ohio Sen. JD Vance even offered a radical solution to the crisis.
“The absurd cost of housing is the result of so many failures, and it reveals so much about what’s broken in Washington,” he said in his convention speech. In his telling, “Wall Street barons crashed the economy and American builders went out of business,” and then “tradesmen scrambled for jobs, houses stopped being built.” Then: “Democrats flooded this country with millions of illegal aliens. So citizens had to compete—with people who shouldn’t even be here—for precious housing.”
His plan, and Trump’s, was to free up housing stock by deporting 11 million people.
Barack and Michelle Obama headlined day two of the Democratic National Convention, which included a roll call of states, as well as speeches by Senators Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, and Kamala Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff. Photographer Nate Gowdy takes us to the convention floor.
Senator Bernie Sanders addresses the DNC. The South Carolina delegation during roll call.Tennessee delegtation during roll call, with the “Tennessee Three” at the front. The Wisconsin delegation decked out in their cheesehead hats.The California delegation during roll call, with Gov. Gavin Newsom speaking.Sen. Chuck Schumer gets down as he takes the stage.Sen. Bernie Sanders leaves the stage.Barack and Michelle Obama share a moment.Former President Barack Obama addresses the DNC.
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