Trump left so Clay Higgins could run

Completely predictableWild news from New York City, where Mayor Eric Adams was charged with a federal crime last night. Exactly which The indictment will not be made public until later in the day. But the City Reportsciting unnamed sources that “Adams is accused of acting as a foreign agent because he took actions in his official capacity after receiving donations from abroad.”

Adams has promised to fight the allegations: “I will fight these injustices with every ounce of my strength and spirit,” he said in a video released last night. “I will request an immediate trial so that New Yorkers can know the truth.”

Adams, who is running for re-election next year, will not resign as mayor, but New York Governor Kathy Hochul could remove him from office early. Happy Thursday.

—Andrew Egger

Yesterday, Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins was scouring social media at work when he saw something that made him angry. A nonprofit organization representing Haitian migrants in Springfield was calling for Donald Trump and JD Vance to be impeached for making them the target of a national moral panic.

So Higgins did what everyone does when they get upset on the internet: He tweeted about it.

“Lol. These Haitians are wild,” Higgins wrote from the Capitol. “Eating pets, Vudu, the worst country in the Western Hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters… but damn if they don’t feel all cultured right now and press charges against our President and Vice President. All these gangsters better get their heads together and get out of the country before January 20th.”

You could throw darts at this now-deleted tweet and hit seven or eight different outrageous things. The racism is clear! The ominous threats against people who are in the country legally are obscene! Referring to Trump and Vance as “President and Vice President” is nonsense! For heaven’s sake, nobody eats pets!

The tweet was enough to cause a brief uproar in the House of Representatives. Higgins was confronted by a number of his black colleagues, including the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus Steven Horsford and Representative Byron Donalds, a member of the House Freedom Caucus and Trump ally. Tempers flared. Horsford demanded that Higgins be officially reprimanded for bringing “discredit and shame on the House of Representatives.” Majority Leader Steve Scalise protested: “The tweet has already been deleted.”

Afterward, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that Higgins “prayed about it, he regretted it, and he retracted the post.” (Where Johnson got the idea that Higgins regretted anything is not entirely clear — Higgins later expressed absolutely no remorse for the post in comments to CNN.)

The most remarkable thing about this whole sordid affair is not that Republicans covered for Higgins—who would have expected that? What is remarkable is that they were willing to admit that he had done anything wrong in the first place. After all, Trump has been lying and fomenting sedition in similarly grotesque ways about Haitians and other migrants for weeks, with no pushback from people like Johnson. Here is one image—of many similar ones—that Trump shared on his social media page just last week:

The Republican Party will always have to fight to distance itself from nutcases and racists. But it becomes pointless to even try when a racist nutcase is the god-emperor at the head of the party. Trump is an industrial plant pumping sewage into a river; Mike Johnson is downstream with a kitchen strainer.

It is almost comical, in a sad way, to watch politicians who wish they could return to a different form of politics but go to such lengths to avoid this simple and obvious reality.

For example, Nikki Haley was heard yesterday on her new radio show on SiriusXM: “You won’t hear me singing Donald Trump’s praises as a person. I have problems with him too. … But politics is not for the faint-hearted. It just isn’t. And I think if you really want to serve your country, you have to be able to put the personal aspect aside.”

And here was Mike Pence, Writing in Wall Street Journal this week:

Republicans have a chance to win a decisive victory in November – not just for their party, but for the entire country. The key to doing so is two things: exposing the undeniable failures of Kamala Harris and the Democrats, and promoting the conservative policies that made the previous administration the most successful in generations. While I have promised to stay out of the presidential race, I firmly believe that the path to victory for Republicans – whether they run for the House, Senate, governorships, or state legislatures – depends on keeping those two goals at the center of the campaign.

It is remarkable to observe: Even people like Haley and Pence, whose careers and lives Trump has turned upside down, continue to treat him as a strange sideshow of Republican politics. The main event, they claim, is still a nebulous group of conservative politics who supposedly remain the beating heart of the republican project. Even now they cannot accept that he destroyed their entire world with a blowtorch. From these ashes, people like Higgins blossom.

—William Kristol

Listen, my children, and you will hear
From Paul Revere’s midnight ride…

I’m reminded of Longfellow’s great poem when we occasionally release the latest polls from the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion at midnight during each election cycle. I don’t know when Lee Miringoff, the longtime head of the respected polling institute, came up with this trick. I suppose it gives their polls a little more attention. In any case, it confuses some of us.

In any case, it’s a well-established thing by now. And so here we are, staying up late, political junkies scattered across the vastness of the Internet, waiting for the stroke of midnight and Marist’s latest polls in six swing states.

(“Get a life, Bill,” you say. “This is my life,” I reply, shedding a tear over the many paths you didn’t take. Could I have been a serious academic, or an underrated poet, or anything other than a person who stays awake to watch the polls in Marist’s swing states? Possibly. But why should I worry about it? As Longfellow’s contemporary Whittier informed us, “Of all the sad words spoken or written, these are the saddest: ‘It might have been.’”)

So there we were at midnight. And there they were! The polls!

Michigan: Harris 52 – Trump 47.

Wisconsin: Harris 50 – Trump 49.

Pennsylvania: Harris 49 – Trump 49.

North Carolina: Harris 49 – Trump 49.

Georgia: Trump 50 – Harris 49.

Arizona: Trump 50 – Harris 49.

OMG, as Longfellow might have said.

Three states are 50-49, two are 49-49. And as if those results weren’t enough to keep you awake at night, Marist apparently didn’t poll Nevada either, making the situation even more unclear.

It could be worse. That was the case in March, when Marist conducted polls in Georgia and North Carolina and Biden was considered the likely candidate. At the time, Trump was ahead in those states by five and three percentage points respectively. Harris has now caught up.

That’s important and it wasn’t inevitable. And my instinct – whatever that means – tells me that Harris has a better chance of winning a few votes over the last six weeks than Trump.

But the fact is, we don’t know who’s going to win the presidency. What we do know is that the race is – how can I put this? Let me list the possibilities – a tie. It’s a coin toss. It’s uncertain. It’s on a knife edge.

It’s difficult to think about this right before bed! If you see the choice addict in your life bleary-eyed and bloodshot today, blame Marist.

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NICE TO BE WITH THE FAMILY: The New York Times Reports: “The private equity firm of Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former President Donald J. Trump, has received at least $112 million in fees from Saudi Arabia and other foreign investors since 2021, though as of July it had not yet paid out profits to the governments that largely fund the firm.”

More than 99 percent of the money invested in Affinity Partners, the Just comes, it is said, from abroad, “including two billion dollars from the Saudi government’s Public Investment Fund. Most of the remaining money comes from the sovereign wealth funds of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.”

Why would these countries be willing to pay nine-figure sums to Jared Kushner without receiving a single cent in return? Unfortunately, we will probably never get an answer to such questions: some things in life are simply unimaginable.

DROP, DROP, DROP: Another day, another round of resignations from Mark Robinson as his usual controversy over the claim that I once praised Hitler and slavery on a porn site continues. Over the weekend, nearly his entire campaign team quit; yesterday, many of the top staff in the lieutenant governor’s office – including his chief of staff and general counsel, his political director, his communications director and his director of government affairs – announced that they were plan to resign also until the end of the month.

Robinson insists He will neither resign nor interrupt his campaign. This means that we Despite it be unprepared for how crazy this campaign could get. After all, anyone with a conscience, a shred of self-respect, or a desire to ever again succeed in halfway respectable politics will flee like rats from a sinking ship. Who knows what will happen when there are even fewer support staff available?

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