Editors’ Blog

I want to be careful not to over-read this part of Biden’s speech, but there was one passage that jumped out for what it might mean about the 2022 and 2024 elections.

It came in the bottom third of the speech, after he had warned of political violence and explicitly blamed Trump and MAGA. It suggests Biden won’t stand idly by as MAGA targets elections and election infrastructure.

What does that mean for 2022 and 2024? Not sure. Here’s the passage:

You may have seen reports about the ongoing tug-of-war or game of chicken between Peter Thiel and Mitch McConnell. In short, it’s about who picks up the tab for the campaigns of Thiel’s political proteges Blake Masters in Arizona and JD Vance in Ohio. Both campaigns are floundering and both need money badly. Given Ohio’s GOP advantages, even a floundering campaign leaves Vance still in a fairly strong position. But it wasn’t even supposed to be a contest. You can go to others for the inside gossip on the back and forth between the two men. I want to focus your attention on something more general.

Biden from Independence Hall in Philadelphia:

Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.

Now, I want to be very clear, very clear up front. Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology. I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans. But there’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. And that is a threat to this country.

In a primetime speech from Pennsylvania, President Biden plans to deliver a national address that has all the makings of a pre-midterms campaign speech.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the newest revelations in the Trump documents case, as well as Republican backpedaling in the face of Dobbs backlash.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

There’s no question that Democrats’ chances in the midterms have improved dramatically over the course of the summer. From the point in May when Sam Alito’s draft of the Dobbs decision leaked to the press until now, the generic ballot average has shifted just over 3.5 points in Democrats’ direction. For the generic ballot average, that’s a big shift. But could the polls themselves be underweighting Republican strength? Like many others I’ve been figuring that Trump being on the ballot has been the key in recent elections. He and his party’s chances were underrated in 2016 and 2020. In 2018, they were pretty much on the mark. But Philip Bump of the Post and I were apparently both watching G. Elliott Morris’s Twitter feed yesterday when he noted that this wasn’t quite true. The national averages were on the mark in 2018. But at the state level key contests still underweighted Republican chances. Bump pulled the numbers himself and sure enough, that skew was there in Senate races in 2018 too.

One point TPM Readers have asked again and again is this: why did Trump court all this trouble when he could have just xeroxed the documents and given the originals back? There are a lot of good and not good potential answers to that question. But as the Times notes here, DOJ investigators aren’t convinced he didn’t. The attestation that Trump and his lawyers had turned over all classified information also included a promise that no copies had been made of them. So those claims are in doubt now too.

A new article in the Post suggests that Trump lawyers Christina Bobb and Evan Corcoran both now face significant legal jeopardy in their own right and are now off the case. The article gets to this point in a somewhat meandering way. But the gist is pretty clear. Notably and in character for Trump, his attorneys appear to be in more imminent legal jeopardy than he is.

In other Trump investigation-adjacent news today, election steal scheming attorney John Eastman’s lawyers think that he is “probably a target” of the Fulton County probe led by District Attorney Fani Willis, who is looking into Trump team efforts to overturn the election results in her state of Georgia.

Even Fox & Friends is struggling with the classified document fiasco at Mar-a-Lago.

Steve Doocey confronted Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD) about it on this morning’s show and managed to sound momentarily reasonable: