Yes, his threats against those who prosecuted him is old news. But now Trump is engaged in blatantly intimidating those helping to get Harris elected. This could have a real effect if he scares off enough big donors and election workers. That’s why I put it in the Kamala Harris thread. He intends to win through intimidation before the election and cheating during the counting and certification process.
Election interference at this level should be seriously illegal but he’s getting around it through weasel words and secret backroom shenanigans. This is banana republic stuff and it’s just mind-boggling that this can happen in a supposedly first-world country.
As an American who moved overseas many years ago and has been looking back at his country of origin from a great distance with much clearer eyes, I have news for you.
Yeah, the US has had significant problems for a long time, but to paraphrase P.J. O’Rourke, at least in modern times they were (mostly) “problems within normal parameters”. It was Trump’s ascension in 2016 that sent everything off the rails into uncharted territory.
He’s essentially a mobster thug threatening Harris’s supporters. “NIce life ya got there, would be a shame if anything happened to it”. This cannot be allowed to continue. He’s gonna claim freeze peach, but at his point he’s materially interfering in the election. IMHO Harris should seek a court order to shut him up. Everyone knows that real election interference is a serious crime. They don’t need a thug pretending to remind them of that with veiled threats that suggest he’ll find “unscrupulous” behaviour in anyone and everyone who helped Harris, because in this thug’s view helping Harris is in itself a crime. That’s what this election has come to.
Keeping in mind that George H W Bush was Vice President before he was elected President, GHWB voted against Trump in 2016 and confirmed he made disparaging remarks against Trump after the election. Bush Sr. died in 2018 so he didn’t know who the 2020 Democrat candidate would be, so endorsement wasn’t possible, but Bush pretty much did the opposite, renunciation.
I can’t see the WP article either, but I’m pretty sceptical. The paragraphs in the image come across as blatant propaganda meant to discredit articles that were written about the dysfunction in the Vice President’s office going back to 2021.
Harris didn’t inherit her staff. The WP article implies she hired people who didn’t expect her level of attention to detail. That’s unlikely, but if it’s true it means she was a poor executive in overseeing her staffing. What’s more likely is that people in her office didn’t like working in a chaotic blame-filled environment and quit for that reason.
And yet the reason frequently given for the usually-disorganized Democratic Party immediately and unanimously lining up behind Harris when Biden discontinued his campaign is that Harris was so well-organized that she had already done substantial work on nailing down support for a potential 2028 campaign. And her fundraising efforts, her choice of VP, her messaging, her campaign strategy all have been revealed to be strong.
Sounds like more propaganda to me. Harris didn’t get the Democratic nomination because she was the most prepared. She got it because she happened to be the Vice President. If Biden had announced he wasn’t running for a second term in 2023, there’s a pretty good chance Harris wouldn’t be the candidate. She inherited the campaign machine that was already underway. Being dropped into an executive role doesn’t make you a good executive.
Working in her previous job and being VP is a magnitude of difference in intensity and importance. It’s possible she “clamped down” in her new job when she was elected (understandably so) and they just weren’t ready for the change.
Being VP didn’t automatically mean she inherited the right to lead the campaign from then on, and it certainly didn’t mean the Democrats would fall completely in line when they rarely have before. And Harris did already have the machinations in place for a 2028 run, whether you wish it to be true or not. And Vice President is already an executive role.
Funny how the right are struggling so much to find any dirt on such a “poor executive” running a “chaotic” campaign office. I suppose that’s why they’re so willing to manufacture so much of it out of nothing.
The situation this election is like a sports team where the head coach is removed in the middle of the season. The best thing to do when that happens is to have one of the assistant coaches move up to head coach. Trying to bring in a new head coach from the outside creates a lot of chaos in the middle of the season which would degrade the team’s ability to win. It seems like Harris is doing a pretty good job of stepping into the role.
I agree that if there was an open primary, I think Harris would have lost. But I also think if there was an open primary, the Democrats would have ended up losing the election. It would have been such a mess trying to pick a new candidate that the Democrats would have lost a lot of support. It doesn’t matter if there’s a better candidate from a theoretical standpoint. The process of making that outside person be the candidate would be so contentious that it would likely guarantee a loss for the Democrats.
So you’re saying she hired people unqualified for the job who later quit because they were unqualified for the job? I suppose that’s possible, but that doesn’t support her as an effective manager. I’d also speculate that working in the Vice President’s office is viewed as a somewhat prestigious position. If people are quitting that position, it’s probably based on the office environment and leadership, rather than the exiters’ qualifications.
If I hire you as the assistant to the store manager, and then he gets a big jump in his career, you might not be ready for that jump. That’s what I’m saying.
The Politco article which you linked lays a large part of the blame on the new chief of staff that Harris hired after she was elected VP. That woman, Tina Flournoy, has an entire career of working for high-ranking Democrats, including Bill Clinton and Joe Lieberman. She worked for Harris for about 16 months before she was replaced.
ISTM that Flournoy was hired because of her past experience and qualifications but did not fit well into the role for which she was hired. And that is not at all unusual in corporate America.
Your speculation doesn’t comport with reporting* on the issue.
This can account for a high turnover rate.
But there was talk of volatility at the beginning of her term as Vice-President, for a myriad of reasons.
Any such problems have subsided.
*All quotes come from the WaPo gift link listed upthread. I don’t know why the link below is so weird.
Kamala Harris ran her office like a prosecutor. Not everyone liked that. After a difficult first year as vice president, Harris has grown into her role — and found staff who respond better to her style, allies say.
I will make a friendly bet. I bet Texas and Flordia go to Trump. All this “too close to call” business in those states is not accurate. Harris will lose both states.
No stakes, but wanna bet? Or feel free to come up with something fun as stakes.
