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Analysis
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Joe Biden claps hands next to U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris while hosting a Juneteenth concert on the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S. June 10, 2024.
After resisting calls from within the Democratic Party for him to resign for weeks, President Joe Biden announced Sunday that he will not run for reelection in November. He then endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him.
What now? By dropping out, the delegates who pledged to vote for Biden can now vote for whomever they want, opening the door for the party to rally behind another candidate ahead of the Democratic National Convention. Alternatively, the party could conduct an open convention where prospective nominees vie for support from delegates at the DNC on Aug. 19.
Bill and Hillary Clinton have already come out in support of Harris, with more party heavyweights expected to endorse her in the coming days. Other potential candidates are unlikely to throw their hats in the ring to avoid creating chaos. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has already announced she is not seeking the nomination, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom endorsed Harris. “I think that they will wait, they’ll bide their time,” says GZERO and Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer. “They will support Harris, and they’ll wait themselves until 2028.”
But that doesn’t mean others won’t consider a bid. Late Sunday, there were reports that Sen. Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, may re-register as a Democrat in order to compete for the nomination.
Still, Harris is an obvious successor for more reasons than just being Biden’s VP. Importantly, the Biden-Harris campaign war chest – totaling $95.9 million at the end of June – can easily transfer to her. Campaign finance law would require those funds be transferred to the DNC or a Super PAC if anyone else becomes the nominee, making coordination far more difficult.
That being said, Ian says that Harris would “benefit from a process that doesn’t look like the political machine has just decided that they’re going to anoint her, that there’s not going to be a primary process … there needs to be some level of competition.”
Who is Kamala Harris? Harris is the first woman, first Black person, and first Asian American to ascend to the vice presidency. And she would be the first female US president if elected.
Harris began her political career as a prosecutor, district attorney, and state attorney general in California, and went on to be elected to the US Senate in 2016. Her law enforcement record has been both a gift and a curse to her political campaigns, giving opponents on both sides of the aisle fodder to point to when she was either too tough, or not tough enough, on crime.
As VP, Harris has struggled to define herself while being tasked with an issue portfolio that included voting rights and stemming illegal migration at the southern border.
How does she fare against Donald Trump? “That’s the big wild card in this election,” says Eurasia Group’s US director Jon Lieber. “Her favorability is basically where Joe Biden’s was – in the high 30s – which is a bad place to be if you’re going to get elected, but Donald Trump isn’t that popular himself.”
An Economist/YouGov survey found that 79% of Democrats would support Harris as the party’s nominee, and across recent polls, Harris trails Trump by two percentage points nationally, 46% to 48%.
Having been Biden’s VP, Harris will be attacked by the GOP for the administration’s handling of the border and the economy. “Trump does better on the top issues in this campaign, which are inflation, the economy, and immigration,” says Lieber.
That said, she has reenergized the Democratic Party, many of whose leaders seemed close to accepting defeat with Biden atop the ticket. Harris, at 59, also brings youth to a campaign that was previously between two octogenarians. Despite having a decades-long political career, most Americans don’t really know Harris, which gives her the opportunity to make a new impression in the 107 days left on the campaign trail.
“That’s an eternity in US politics,” says Ian. “It is longer than most elections in democracies” around the world.
FILE PHOTO: Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks, as he holds a campaign rally for the first time with his running mate, Republican vice presidential nominee U.S. Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) in Grand Rapids, Michigan, U.S. July 20, 2024.
President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race has spurred a crescendo of calls from Republicans for him to resign from the White House immediately, arguing that if he is too old to run, he is too old to serve until his term ends in January.
Biden won’t make decisions based on the opposing party, and any effort to force him out of office or protest whoever replaces him as the nominee would be an uphill legal battle, but the GOP will continue to try to capitalize on the chaos.
“The Democrats can pick who they want,” says Eurasia Group’s US director Clayton Allen, “but you could see some astroturfed efforts to push back on the new nominee,” by claiming that the switch is unlawful and fueling Republican fears that the Democrats are not playing by the rules.
This is bad news for the Trump Campaign, which hasn’t been focused on beating just any Democrat but has been sharply focused on defeating Biden by capitalizing on his perceived frailty to cast Trump as the stronger man for the job.
The decision also comes after the Republican National Convention, robbing them of critical air time to attack whoever becomes their new opponent. They are likely scrambling to recreate a campaign strategy focused onVice President Kamala Harris, who Biden endorsed to take his place as the party’s nominee. The GOP has already released an attack ad pinning the blame for Biden’s handling of the border and the economy on Harris.Illustration shows several congressmen engaged in a brawl on the floor of the House of Representatives.
How does this all end? Does it? It’s a question a lot of Americans have been asking themselves in the week since an assassin’s bullet missed Donald Trump’s skull by less than a quarter of an inch.
It was, of course, the first time a gunman had put a US president (or former president) in his sights since the 1981 attempt on Ronald Reagan. Most Americans alive today have no memory of that moment.
In some ways, such a long reprieve between assassinations was unusual for the United States.
Despite what President Joe Biden said this week about this kind of violence having “no place” in American society, high-level political killings are deeply woven into US history. At least a quarter of all US presidents have been targeted for death, most of them in the 20th century alone. Four died.
But the atmosphere in America is vastly more polarized and divided than it was even when Reagan was shot, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better.
To be clear, some degree of polarization by itself isn’t a bad thing. Disagreement is important. You don’t want a society where everyone believes the same thing privately, much less one in which people only feel comfortable saying the same thing publicly. That’s not a functional democracy – that’s North Korea.
The trouble, though, is what experts call “pernicious polarization.” That’s when political divisions harden into increasingly dissociated tribes, each of which views the other not as fellow citizens with different experiences and ideas, but as mortal enemies.
That’s the America we live in today. It’s an America where liberals and conservatives not only don’t trust each other, marry each other, or vote for each other – they barely even see or interact with each other. “Liberal” and “conservative” have gone from being political labels to tribal affiliations, and the tribes live on different islands.
How bad is it? A sweeping historical study of polarization by the Carnegie Endowment found that since 1950, no advanced democracy has suffered levels of polarization as high, or for as long, as what the US has experienced over the past 10 years.
And, soberingly, it also found that no liberal democracy around the world has been able to retreat from extreme polarization with its democracy intact.
It wasn’t always this way. Even during the 1960s and 1970s, when America was convulsed with political violence over civil rights, the Vietnam War, and counterculture, the two parties had a lot more ideological overlap. You could find Democrats who were pro-life and Republicans who were concerned about access to guns. (One of them was Reagan’s spokesman Jim Brady, who after being severely wounded in the 1981 shooting, dedicated his life to passing sensible gun control laws – the 1993 “Brady Bill” is named after him.)
This sort of thing is what political scientists call “crosscutting polarization” – i.e., divisions that slash through party divisions, preventing partisan groups from becoming warring teams. In short: We need more crosscutting again.
The trouble is that a lot of things work against that: geographical segregation along political lines; social media algorithms that reward extreme viewpoints; a decline of local media reporting on issues close to people’s lives; a two-party political system where districts are often heavily gerrymandered, forcing politicians to pander to the extremes rather than to build bridges.
Conflict is a more rational strategy than compromise in almost all areas of our politics even if it’s leading us all off a cliff into a very dark ravine.
Rising political violence is one result. Last year, for example, there were more than 8,000 threats of violence against federal lawmakers, a tenfold increase since 2016.
And as we slouch toward the most contentious and high-stakes election in America’s modern history, most people seem resigned to things getting worse. A poll taken just after the attempt on Trump’s life showed that two-thirds of Americans think the current environment makes political violence more likely.
Is there any hope? Yes, says Murat Somer, a political science professor at Ozyegin University in Istanbul, who co-authored the Carnegie report.
“You have to redefine politics in a way that cuts across those cultural divisions,” he says. One way to do that, he says, is to put the focus back on one of the underlying causes of polarization and lack of trust in institutions in the first place: the decline of social mobility.
“What people have in common across party lines,” he says, “is unhappiness about inequality.”
That’s a start. Other theorists see structural changes that could help. Lee Drutman, a scholar at the New America Foundation, and author of the book “The Two Party Doom Loop”,says tweaking the two-party system by introducing multi-member congressional districts with proportional representation would help to smudge the partisan lines in constructive ways again.
But most of all, it may require a change of mindset – to stop believing that every election is possibly the last one for the America we love (whichever one that may be.)
“It’s important not to think ‘well, if we lose this election it’s over,’” says Somer. “No, it’s not over. A new phase or a new period will start, but it’s not over. It’s very important not to give up after elections, because no president, from either party, can very rapidly or fundamentally transform the country.”
Drutman agrees. “Things may be a little ugly for a while,” he says, “but I do think that there are enough people who are engaged in the work of democratic renewal that we will get to the other side of this. I don't know what the cost of getting to the other side of this will be, but I do think eventually we’ll get to a better political environment.”
What do you think? Can we reduce polarization? Should we? What would you like to see happen? Write us here. If you include your name and location, we may run your response in an upcoming edition of the GZERO Daily Newsletter.
Donanld Trump at the RNC
| USA TODAY NETWORK |
On the fourth and final night of the RNC, Donald Trump took to the stage for the first time since he was nearly assassinated at a campaign rally. He began his speech with a detailed, dramatic retelling of the shooting, in which he was saved by God, in the style of a grandfather telling their grandchild a war story at bedtime. Members of the audience cried, he kissed the firefighter uniform of Corey Comperatore, who was killed by the assassin. He called for unity.
"The discord and division in our society must be healed. As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart," said Trump, who went on to say that he was running to be president for "all of America, not half of America."
But Trump’s sedate and sentimental calls for harmony quickly evaporated, giving way to his more standard attacks on Democrats. “They’re destroying our country,” he said. Trump also repeatedly claimed that the Democrats stole the 2020 election, saying “they used COVID to cheat.” (For a deep dive into the stolen election conspiracy theory, check this out.)
And he went on. And on. And on. For more than an hour and a half – the longest nomination acceptance speech on record – he described meanderingly, an economy in shambles, a murderous job-stealing invasion of illegal immigrants, and a world on fire: all courtesy of Joe Biden, all fixable only by Donald Trump. When he concluded – nearly half an hour after first saying “in conclusion” – many of even the most faithful Trumpers in the room were reportedly fidgety.
Still, every party convention is a jamboree for its candidate, and in the wake of Trump’s near-death experience, this convention has had an almost-religious, over-the-top zeal. From the MAGA outfits (seriously, you need to look at the dresses), to Hulk Hogan tearing off his shirt to reveal a Trump/Vance tank top, and Trump repeatedly claiming that he survived the attack only because he “had God on [his] side” the final night cemented the impression of Trump as a kind of divinely protected figure, even a deity in his own right.
This is a changed Republican party. Traditional establishment figures like Mitch McConnell got a mild reception, while MAGA figures, regardless of whether they have a political background, were enthusiastically embraced – none more than Trump’s Veep pick, JD Vance.
The one thing Republicans avoided talking about. Speakers hammered Biden on inflation, immigration, and foreign policy. But one thing they didn’t talk much about was abortion. Despite Roe v Wade’s demise being one of the crowning achievements of the Trump presidency, abortion has barely received a passing mention, likely because the party recognizes that it is a divisive and politically toxic issue. Even JD Vance, an absolutist on restricting abortion, has stayed silent on the issue during the convention.
It's also another sign of the changing nature of the party. Abortion was once a rallying force within the GOP, but is now the latest example of how the Republican Party is departing from decades of party orthodoxy as it undergoes a historic realignment to woo younger, more diverse, and working-class voters.
Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump raises his fist during Day 1 of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on July 15, 2024.
Does the thrill of political momentum threaten to undermine the most important part of any campaign: the policies?
By any measure — polls, donor dollars, media attention — all the political momentum, or “mo,” in campaign 2024 has swung to Donald Trump. It started after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance — it was like a coming-out party for the erosions of old age — but hit speed records in the wake of the tragic assassination attempt. The former president’s now-iconic moment of badassery, when, blood trickling down his face, he pumped his fist and yelled, “Fight, fight, fight,” has animated Republicans. He says he even changed his convention speech to reflect the reality of political violence and polarization — and that will be one of the big things to watch for tonight. Many, like Sen. Marco Rubio, argued that Trump’s survival was proof of divine intervention (Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called it a “miracle” and claimed the flag aboveDonald Trump took the form of an angel right before the gunshot), infusing the campaign with a Christian nationalism and eschatology.
Tech oligarch Elon Musk just announced that he is donating $45 million a month to Trump, joining his billionaire tech bro Peter Thiel on the MAGA train that is surprisingly making lucrative stops in Silicon Valley, once a bastion of Democratic support. Adding to the Trump “mo” is the ascension of 39-year-old Marine veteran, financier, lawyer, and “Hillbilly Elegy” author JD Vance as the VP nominee. Vance’s biographically marbled speech at the RNC on Wednesday night highlighted his background in an Ohio devastated by globalization and the opioid crisis. It featured his mother, who has struggled with addiction, a personal story that tenderized the red meat served up earlier by Donald Trump Jr. and Peter Navarro. Navarro had just been released from a four-month sentence for defying a subpoena from the Jan. 6 congressional committee — and was cheered as a hero, which was as telling about the new RNC anti-institution, radical culture as anything that has happened so far.
Vance directly appealed to working-class voters in key swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. At times, it sounded like an old-school pro-union, pro-tariff Democrat speech from the 1990s, and it was a starkly different pitch than the massive corporate tax cuts Trump pitches, but it’s now on-brand for the neo-Republican coalition of angry working-class males and right-wing, anti-regulatory tech, energy, and mining elites.
MAGA now has an heir but more importantly a license to think generationally as opposed to just four-year election cycles. This is no longer about just an impulsive “dictator-for-a-day” vengeance win over the Biden administration and the “wokeys.” It’s about a fundamental hard-right-wing rewiring of American politics and international relations. The battle plan is the Heritage Foundation’s Platform 2025, and the foot soldiers are the once-fringe MAGA-ites like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump Jr., and Matt Gaetz, who will play significant roles in a Trump administration.
This is what the Trump “mo” looks like numerically: A new YouGov poll has Trump ahead in key swing states like Arizona (+7 points), Georgia, (+4), Michigan (+2), North Carolina (+4), Wisconsin (+5), and Pennsylvania (+3). In other words, Trump and his MAGA-ites are out-polling, out-rolling, and out-trolling Democrats on all levels.
Meanwhile, it’s chaos in Bidenlandia, where the president is collecting bad news like a wool sock gathers burrs in the forest. On Wednesday, he revealed he has COVID as he was desperately trying to reset his campaign and get over his stilted, confused, mistake-riddled performances. He’s now picking up viruses faster than endorsements, and the odds that he will not make it to the convention as the nominee are rising.
A new poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research revealed that most Democrats want Biden to step down, a sentiment buttressed by a stunning call from high-ranking Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff, who is running for the Senate in California. “I believe it is time for him to pass the torch,” Schiff said. Late Wednesday, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer reportedly joined the calls for Biden to leave, but he did so privately. Et tu, Chuck?
The thing about political momentum is that it’s often generated by factors that have nothing to do with the core reason elections exist: policy. Who has the best ideas to govern the country? That is the core question, not who looks best in an ad. This is an election to run a country, not an audition for a modeling agency, but it’s hard to tell the difference anymore. How much does an assassination attempt or a bad debate performance have to do with who is best to deal with a rogue Russia, an aggressive China, or a war in the Middle East? Who can tackle inflation, productivity issues, and climate change? Who will handle AI regulation or protect the rights of minorities? Who will handle the border crisis? Who will actually create jobs? Do tariffs help the economy, or drive up costs? Who will stand for a peaceful transition of power or an independent judiciary? Who should pick the seats on the Supreme Court?
On all these matters, there are real, consequential policy debates – on some, Republicans are stronger, and on others, Democrats are stronger. This is the battlefield on which Biden would like to fight because he believes Trump — with his 34 felonies and his readiness to throw Ukraine to Russia, Taiwan to China, and most judicial and governing checks and balances out the window — is vulnerable. But he can’t. The political momentum is against Biden, and when that happens, you lose the most important aspect of campaigning: setting the agenda.
Biden is totally reactive now, and even as he pitches policies to get on his front foot — on Wednesday he was courting Latinos with the promise that undocumented spouses of US citizens could avoid getting deported — they evaporate like a puddle in Death Valley. When he gets to a stage to talk about policy, he can barely articulate the words without stumbling, faltering, and losing his train of thought. For post-debate Biden, the mistakes are the message. That’s what happens when you lose the political mo.
Things can change, of course. Events happen, like the horrible shooting or the debate, and suddenly the big mo shifts, but it’s getting late and harder to see that happening. For now, the biggest story of the campaign is not policy, it’s momentum, and while that makes for dramatic storylines, it tells voters less about potential Gulf wars and more about fabricated golf scores. Political mo matters and is essential to winning, but it can be used to introduce policy ideas or to avoid them and focus only on attacks and slogans.
There is another consequence: Political mo speeds everything up and floods the zone with stories about snap polls and hot takes on winners and losers. But the whole point of campaigns is to debate the opposition, to pause from the pace of governing, and slow things down for a considered reset. Campaigns are meant for people to ask questions. Check facts. Read the details. Holds folks accountable. And make a considered decision.
That’s not political mo — it’s policy mo. Political mo and policy mo should be intimately linked, but with the dramatic events these past months — felony convictions, age-related floundering, shootings — the coverage is over-indexing on the politics and under-indexing on policy. When each candidate has such a radically different view of America, a little policy mo is badly needed. Sadly, it’s turning out that examining ideas closely and factually is a political loser.
If you are worried the attempted assassination of Donald Trump is likely to lead to more political violence in the United States in the months ahead, you are in good company.
The people who spend their careers studying the question are rattled.
“If the election is close, I expect violence of various sorts,” says Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Kleinfeld, whose 2018 book, “A Savage Order,”set out a framework for understanding political violence around the world, is afraid that more American blood will be spilled. This is partly because bad things tend to happen in countries — like the United States — that have a history of political violence.
Kleinfeld pointed out in a recent podcast that Trump has encouraged the intimidation of election workers in swing states, used violent rhetoric about Republicans, like Liz Cheney, who express concern about his anti-democratic tendencies, and uses violence or the threat of it to rally his base.
“I’m not worried about that kind of civil war,” she said. “I am worried about targeted political violence.”
Kleinfeld has been warning about the potential for violence in the United States because of the changing mood in the country. Increasing numbers of Americans think it is justified, on both the right and the left.
About 18 million Americans support the use of force to restore Trump to the presidency, but more — 26 million — believe violence is justified to stop that from happening, according to a recent national survey conducted by University of Chicago professor of political science Robert Pape.
Americans are aware of the increased danger. In a YouGov poll taken after Saturday’s assassination attempt, 67% of respondents said the current environment makes politically motivated violence “more likely.”
Hate crimes are up dramatically — as are threats to Congress. The FBI revealed that a record-setting 11,643 hate crimes were reported by police in 2022, and the ADL has seen a surge in antisemitism in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Kleinfeld says there’s no reason to expect a civil war — but that’s because the US military is too powerful to be challenged.
‘You don’t need a civil war’
But full-scale war isn’t necessary when strategic use of political violence will do — or when it can help one side achieve its goals within a democracy. “You don’t need a civil war to try to take over a party with violence, and you don’t need a civil war to try to build your base with violence,” Kleinfeld said in a recent podcast.
The assassination attempt — which is as yet poorly understood — aligns with a story Trump supporters believe, says Amarnath Amarasingam, an extremism researcher at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. It “fits into everything that the Trump team and MAGA Republicans have been saying since 2015 — that there is a kind of deep-state evil force that’s trying to stop Trump.”
Many Trump supporters still believe the 2020 election was stolen. As of last September, a whopping 63% of Republicans believed Biden’s win was illegitimate, despite evidence to the contrary. Now, Trump’s legal cases and convictions are being characterized as more ways to try to bring him down.
“When all of that failed, here you have them actually trying to kill him,” they think, says Amarasingam.
What fuels the extreme rhetoric?
The sense of a struggle for survival on both sides increases the risk of reprisals, and of more political violence, says Amarasingam. “This is kind of the core of how we think about extremist movements. Once you see an existential threat to you and your in-group, you and your people, then violence is acceptable.”
Lindsay Newman, Eurasia Group’s head of global macro-geopolitics, also believes the risk may get greater after the election but notes that it is unclear whether the risk will come only from the right.
“What do you think happens if Trump wins? What does everybody do? Do all the voters who voted for Biden, or for not-Trump, go home and just wait their turn for next time? What do you think happens if Biden wins? Do all those people who voted for Trump just go home and wait for their next time?,” she wonders.
Most Americans are opposed to political violence, but increasingly large minorities on both sides are not. “Not all of them are going to take up any sort of acts of violence, but some portion of those people will be aggrieved, will be deeply aggrieved,” says Newman.
“And what happens to them? Do they protest? Do the protests turn violent?”
Can the campaigns use this moment to find unity?
It seems unlikely the two campaigns will stop using rhetoric that is convincing so many Americans that the election represents an existential struggle.
After the assassination attempt, Republican Sen. JD Vance blamed Biden for portraying Trump as ”an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” saying that rhetoric “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Joe Bidendelivered a speech calling for unity, but he is continuing to call Trump a “threat to democracy,” which seems to be a necessary part of his struggling campaign.
And on Monday, Trump named Vance as his vice presidential candidate, after which the crowd at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee chanted, “Fight, fight, fight,” echoing Trump’s defiant words after an assassin’s bullet almost ended his life.
The trouble is, neither side can afford to stop using the rhetoric that is encouraging their supporters to see November’s election in such stark terms that they feel they are right to fight.
JD Vance
On the third day of the Republican National Convention, themed “Make America Strong Once Again,” the GOP laid out their vision for the world, outlining what US foreign policy could look like under Donald Trump and JD Vance.
In his keynote address, Vance officially accepted the nomination to be Trump’s VP running mate and used his working-class upbringing to make his key foreign policy points: that globalization has ruined neighborhoods like his, foreign intervention has led to his friends dying overseas, and that the working class is declining because Washington is in the pocket of multinational corporations.
He said the US needs “a leader who is not in the pocket of big business but answers to the working man, union and nonunion alike … a leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations.” This runs in contrast to an interview Trump gave this week callingfor a more than $700 billion cut to the corporate tax rate.
Vance couldn’t have been received with more enthusiasm. He called out his grandmother, who he referred to as “Mamaw,” and his mother Beverly, who struggled with drug addiction in his early life, as the crowd broke into chants of “JD’s mom” and “Mamaw.”
“To the people of Middletown, Ohio, and all the forgotten communities in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and every corner of our nation,” Vance said, shouting out key swing states in this year’s election, “I promise you this: I will never forget where I came from.”
Before he took to the stage, the evening’s speakers painted Trump as a strongman necessary during tumultuous times. They also called for increasing US energy production, hammered Joe Biden on his trade policy and handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal, and called for a crackdown on immigration through the Southern border.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was met with a resounding chant of “Send them back! Send them back! Send them back!” during his speech in praising Trump’s immigration agenda, which he said includes plans to deport migrants who enter the US illegally. He was followed by Trump’s former ICE director, Tom Homan, who told undocumented immigrants “You’d better start packing now. You're damn right. Because you’re going home.”
Doug Burgum gave a hint at what energy policy would look like under Trump 2.o. The North Dakota governor is a likely pick for Trump’s Energy Secretary and linked US energy independence with national security, saying that Biden “is using mandates to shut down reliable baseload electricity. That is why your electric bills have shot upwards.” He ended by taking a knock at Biden’s efforts to incentivize Americans to purchase electric vehicles, saying that Trump will let the crowd keep driving gas-powered cars.
He was followed by the parents of the 13 US soldiers killed in the bombing in Kabul amid the Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021 who, alongside military officials, criticized Biden’s handling of the withdrawal and response in the aftermath.
But could Republican criticisms of the withdrawal from Afghanistan under Biden come back to bite them when it comes to defending Trump’s plans for Ukraine? Vance said at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year that it is unrealistic for the US to continue providing the same level of assistance to Ukraine moving forward, and Trump has signaled that he would reduce aid to Ukraine. But would the former president – who prides himself on being a winner – be willing to lose Ukraine?
Tomorrow, on the RNC’s final day, Trump will address the country for the first time since becoming the official Republican nominee – and less than a week after he was nearly assassinated.
Latest
Bye-bye Biden. Will Dems choose Harris?
How will the GOP respond?
The end of polarization in America?
Political Mo: The price of a winning streak?
Americans are right to be afraid
