What More Do You People Want from Kamala Harris?

Let’s do this rundown style.

1. Harris delivered the goods. You never know if a politician can play on the national stage until they do it. Sometimes a promising candidate pops. Sometimes they’re Ron DeSantis.

At every turn over the last seven weeks, Harris popped. From her first speech at the campaign HQ in Delaware, to the first big rally, to her convention speech, to the debate—she answered the bell every time.

She is not coasting. She is not simply existing as a non-octogenarian alternative to Trump. She is waging a smart, vigorous campaign and executing at a high level.

2. Harris has positioned herself as a centrist, Biden Democrat. From the opening question, Harris talked about her support for family formation (a big conservative talking point) and her recognition of the importance of small-businesses (a key Republican constituency).

She emphasized her plan for tax cuts. She was hawkish on Russia and China. She offered an unwavering commitment to Israel. She noted that she and her running mate are both gun owners. She talked about the importance of supporting law enforcement and making the criminal justice system work. She is in favor of the strictest border control bill ever passed by the Senate.

I’m not sure what else moderate voters could ask from her. If someone doesn’t believe in or trust Harris, that’s fine and they can say so. But don’t pretend that she’s running as something she’s not. Harris has positioned her candidacy in the dead center of American politics.

3. Joe Biden made last night possible. He’s the one who drafted Harris in 2020. He’s the one who put his ego and career aside for the good of the country seven weeks ago. He’s the one who blessed her candidacy, short-circuiting a convention fight and starting the consolidation of the Democratic party.

When all is said and done, Biden should be regarded as one of the most extraordinary presidents of the last century.

4. Harris is also a politician who did two politician-y things in the debate. First, she took Trump’s “bloodbath” comment out of context. Second she said Trump would support a national abortion ban, which may or may not be true.

Shame on her. I hope she goes to time out, thinks about what she did, and does a better job upholding the standards of truth in politics.

Trump, on the other hand, claimed that there are states where babies are killed after delivery. And that in Springfield, Ohio, migrants are stealing and eating people’s pets. And that on January 6, it was Nancy Pelosi who refused to send in the National Guard. And that he didn’t lose the 2020 election.

This is a partial list of his lies.

If you cannot tell the difference between one politician who took one quotation out of context and then made a prediction about her opponent’s future behavior, which is not fully supported by existing evidence, and another politician who just makes up crazy stories about things which did not actually happen—and lies about having won a presidential election—then I can’t help you.

But Harris was very bad to take the word “bloodbath” out of context. I hope she does better next time. 🙄

5. The ABC moderators did a good job. Many people who claim to dislike Trump are outraged this morning that on four occasions the ABC moderators corrected factually untrue statements from Trump.

For the record, here were the brief and value-neutral corrections:

Trump said, “They even have, and you can look at the governor of West Virginia, the previous governor of West Virginia, not the current governor, who’s doing an excellent job, but the governor before, he said the baby will be born and we will decide what to do with the baby. In other words, we’ll execute the baby.”
Trump said, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country.”
Trump said, “All over the world crime is down. All over the world except here. Crime here is up and through the roof. Despite their fraudulent statements that they made. Crime in this country is through the roof.”
Trump continued to insist that he won the 2020 election.

That’s it. That was the “fact checking.”

The moderators did not contradict any of Trump’s routine exaggerations and lies about how recent inflation was the highest in history (it wasn’t), or that his economy was the greatest in history (same), or that the Biden administration left $85 billion worth of “brand new beautiful military equipment behind” in Afghanistan ($83 billion was the total amount spent by the U.S. military over 20 years to build and train Afghan security forces).

It was just those four very large and very specific lies on which the moderators corrected the record.

And good for them.

Some conservatives seem to think that news networks exist to serve the interests of their preferred candidates. That is a misunderstanding.

A journalistic institution exists to serve its audience by giving them the clearest possible understanding of reality. The first duty of a journalistic institution is not to be “fair” to the politicians it covers. It is to make certain that its audience is presented an accurate view of reality.

ABC News understood those priorities last night. They should be commended.

As for the conservatives who are upset that ABC would point out Trump’s lies, there is a simple remedy: Don’t nominate as your presidential candidate an ignoramus who lies pathologically. ABC didn’t make Trump the Republican nominee. Republican voters did. Take it up with those very fine people.

Also: If Donald Trump can’t stand up to four fact checks from David Muir and Linsey Davis, then surely he’s not capable of handling the demands of the presidency and facing down the Vladimir Putins of the world.

You know, with strength.

By the way: We’re not here at The Bulwark to serve the candidates. We’re here to serve you. And not by telling you what you want to hear, but by trying to give you the clearest possible understanding of reality. We told you about that reality after the Biden debate in late June, when nobody wanted to hear it.

And we’re telling you about the reality this morning, when there’s good news for democracy.

If this is the kind of reporting and analysis you want, then you should be with us.

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6. Trump is who he is. While most people in Conservatism Inc. are blaming last night on the ABC moderators, some conservatives are blaming Trump, saying that he performed poorly.

Yes and no.

This was Trump’s seventh general election debate and if you were ranking his performances, it falls somewhere between 3rd and 5th.

Last night wasn’t Bad Trump. It was Median Trump.

The problem is that “Median Trump” is several standard deviations below the political norm. Again: If you are a professional conservative who find this fact upsetting, perhaps you should take it up with Republican voters.

7. Trump has been massacred in debates twice before. His first debate against Hillary Clinton was a blowout. He completely disqualified himself. Clinton was sharp and disciplined. Trump went on to win the Electoral College.

His first debate against Biden was also a blowout. Biden crushed him. Trump came within ~~a whisker~~ about 44,000 votes of winning.

Past performance is not an indication of future gains, yadda yadda yadda.

But still.

8. What will it say about America if Trump’s numbers don’t drop over the next week?

We have had every chance to reject Donald Trump.

We saw him mishandle a crisis, resulting in an economic collapse and hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.

We saw him attempt a violent coup.

When voters said, “I don’t love Trump, but that other candidate is super old . . .” Democrats went and swapped out Joe Biden for Kamala Harris.

Harris has been a good candidate. She has run as a rock-solid moderate. She just curb-stomped Trump in front of tens of millions of voters.

What else do people want?

I’m serious about this: What else could Harris possibly do? Because it looks to me like she’s an above-average candidate, running in a good economic environment, playing near-perfect baseball against a guy who says he wants to be a dictator.

And the response of the American people is: Harris +1.1.

What happens if, a week after last night’s demonstration, this race is still a toss-up? What does that tell us about the long-term viability of American democracy?

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9. It’s September 11. I hope we never lose track of this day. This is a video about Jim Maroon, who cleans the pools at the 9/11 memorial in New York every night. That’s not a job; it’s a vocation. Thank you, Jim.

First of all: The art on this piece is amazing. Kudos to Vanity Fair and illustrator Marc Burckhardt.

Second: The piece itself, by Kathryn Joyce, hits on what used to be a small problem in the American Catholic Church, but has become a larger problem: The habit that some conservative priests have of chasing high-profile converts.

Back when I was in D.C., there was a priest at the downtown Catholic Information Center who was known for this sort of thing. He won a bunch of famous converts and some not-famous converts from inside the conservative movement. At times, it was a little much. But also: All roads lead to Rome, the Church always has Her arms open, etc.

This VF piece is about an aspect of convert chasing that is somewhat less pure.

On Thursday, May 30, 593 years after Joan of Arc was burned at the stake, Candace Owens came to Scottsdale to take up her sword. It was the feast day of St. Joan, and there was an evening Mass at Phoenix’s Joan of Arc Church, then a trek to the suburban Hilton, where an upstart group named Catholics for Catholics was throwing a party to welcome Owens “home.” The group, founded in 2022 to declare non-Catholic Republicans “more Catholic” than their Democratic opponents, was presenting Owens its Joan of Arc Award for “giving Christ the King his proper due.”

It was a month out from Owens’s April announcement that she’d joined the Catholic Church and two months since she’d been fired by the right-wing Daily Wire. The events weren’t unrelated. . . .

It only followed that Owens’s conversion would come wrapped in controversy too, namely her very public split with the Daily Wire. The controversy centered on her repeated use of the phrase “Christ is king,” a mantra with a contested legacy among Catholics but which in recent years has become associated with the young men who shout it the loudest—the far-right “groyper” movement that follows white nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes. Owens denounced the comparison as guilt by association, but her other recent comments—about WWII Germans being the victims of a “Christian Holocaust,” “gangs” of Hollywood Jews, and her taunt that the Daily Wire’s Jewish cofounder Ben Shapiro couldn’t “serve both God and money”—didn’t help her insistence that she was just making a statement of faith. . . .

A month later, when she posted pictures of her baptism at a Latin Mass church in London, the outpouring was comparable. Within a day, she was announced as a headliner for this fall’s right-wing Catholic Identity Conference. Within weeks, she and her husband, George Farmer—former CEO of the failed far-right social media platform Parler and a convert himself—were photographed with a Catholic right podcaster at a gala fundraiser in Nashville, then later on the 60-mile Chartres Pilgrimage in France, alongside 18,000 Latin Mass devotees (including, this year, French nationalist politician Marion Maréchal).

Catholic Twitter hummed with excitement. Owens wasn’t the only recent prominent convert, or even Catholics for Catholics’ first. When CFC hosted a prayer dinner for former president Donald Trump in March, founder and CEO John Yep announced that one speaker, embattled Mormon activist Tim Ballard, whose questionable claims of fighting child sex trafficking inspired the 2023 film Sound of Freedom, was considering converting too. Then there was actor Shia LaBeouf, comedian Rob Schneider, Dutch pundit Eva Vlaardingerbroek, and of course Ohio senator JD Vance, who converted in 2019, five years before he’d be named the Republicans’ 2024 vice presidential nominee. Not to mention the maybes: British actor Russell Brand, who’d begun hawking a Christian prayer app (partly funded by Vance and his Silicon Valley mentor Peter Thiel) and making videos about the rosary, and psychologist turned guru Jordan Peterson, whose wife converted on Easter and who’d been on an international speaking tour called “We Who Wrestle With God.”

A bonanza of speculation arose about who might be next: Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Trump himself? By early spring, antiabortion outlet LifeSiteNews was publishing articles on “why ‘culture warriors’ should convert to Catholicism.” “Can you feel the energy shifting?” the conservative political advocacy group CatholicVote tweeted repeatedly. “Continue praying for conversions.”

Pray for culture warrior conversions?

I love a good conversion and people convert for all sorts of reasons: For love, for convenience—sometimes even to satisfy the deepest yearning of their souls.

But when people start converting because they see the Catholic Church as an ally in the broader culture war?

Not great, Bob.

I don’t want to make too much of this. It’s not the end of the world. The Church has survived for 2,000 years. It outlasted the Romans, the Borgias, and the Bubonic plague. It has survived terrible popes, evil clergy, and wicked laymen. The last 40 years of the American Church has basically been a slow-motion train wreck. Sure, with lots of good being done, but also lots of bad. Candace Owens and JD Vance aren’t going to wreck it any more by joining our club.

But there’s one thing worth unpacking a little bit here.

The Church is Catholic and universal. But every country’s Church has its own set of problems. In Italy, it’s the total and complete systemic corruption of bureaucracies. In Germany, it’s the weird legacy tax system which funds the Church.

In America, the Catholic Church’s problem—maybe its biggest current problem—is the extent to which American-ness overwhelms the Catholicity. The American Church is in danger of transforming in the way evangelical churches have.

But like I said: I don’t want to make too much of it. We all have our crosses to bear.