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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.
Political Mo: The price of a winning streak?
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.
Donald Trump supporters in Huntington Beach, Calif., on July 14, 2024.
Iran reportedly plotted to kill Trump
While Day Two of the RNC focused on “Making America Safer Once Again,” reports surfaced Tuesday that US authorities had received intelligence in recent weeks about an Iranian plot to kill former President Donald Trump.
The warning reportedly led to increased security for Trump, raising even more alarm and questions over the security breach by would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks last Saturday. Officials said no link has been found between Crooks and a foreign plot.
The Trump campaign would not comment on what it knew before Saturday. But the Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the UN had plenty to say: It denied the allegations, noting that while Trump is a criminal in Tehran’s mind “and must be prosecuted and punished in a court of law for ordering the assassination of General Soleimani,” Iran is pursuing only legal recourse.
NSC spokesperson Adrienne Watsonsaid the US has “been tracking Iranian threats against former Trump administration officials for years, dating back to the last administration.” She said the threats emanate from Tehran’s desire for revenge over the US drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, who was Iran’s top general, which Trump ordered in January 2020.
Republican presidential candidate and former US President Donald Trump is assisted by the Secret Service after gunfire rang out during a campaign rally at the Butler Farm Show in Butler, PA, on July 13, 2024.
Electoral violence comes out of the shadows
The brazen assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump this weekend has pulled from the shadows an inevitable implication of the country’s polarization: the risk of political violence. In this consequential US election year, with questions of institutional legitimacy hanging in the air, misinformation flooding social media, and worries about the fitness of at least one of the candidates, we have now been alerted to how real the threat of violence is for the months ahead.
Elections offer voters an opportunity to express something fundamental about what they expect from their government. This is at least the theoretical underpinning for conducting elections. But in each election, losers also have a responsibility. At its core, democracy is a system in which groups lose elections. Votes are held, results are counted and respected, and turnovers take place. Losers consent to being losers in any given election cycle because they believe they will have the opportunity to be winners in the future.
If, however, the institutional framework does not allow losers to become winners later, the system’s legitimacy erodes. Losers may withdraw their consent and pursue alternative strategies to access power. Sometimes this leads to boycotting elections, but sometimes the strategy is the use of force.
When winners repeatedly win and losers repeatedly lose, or if winners are perceived to repeatedly win and losers to lose, ballots may be replaced by bullets. In fact, according to data from the National Elections Across Democracy and Autocracy Dataset, in more than 4,000 global elections between 1945 and 2020, just under 19% of them involved significant violence. Nearly one in five elections over the past 75 years turned violent. Already in this pivotal election year, we have seen violence in the run-up to elections in Senegal, Pakistan, South Africa, Mexico (at historic rates), and France.
In the US, grievances that have been stoked around the legitimacy of the system and how well it is serving voters, travel through the existing fault lines in American politics – particularly political party identification – activating them further. It is now a near-truism that there is little common ground between the two political sides, and the gap is widening.Survey data from 2022 and 2023 has repeatedly found that a wide swath of the US population believes the system is rigged, and as much as a quarter of those polled agreed that it may soon be time to take up arms against the government. In 2021, these realities culminated in the Jan. 6 storming of the US Capitol. In 2024, this blueprint heightens the likelihood of civil unrest and violence across the US in the lead-up to and, depending on the outcome, after the election.
The name Thomas Matthew Crooks will now go down in the annals of US history alongside John Hinckley Jr. and Lee Harvey Oswald. While very little is currently known about what motivated Crooks’ attempt, lone-offender terrorism has become all too common. It speaks to a broader thread of radicalization that has emerged from US polarization – as political parties no longer speak to the same set of facts and individuals find themselves moving towards the extremes.
“Lone actors are difficult to detect and disrupt because of their lack of affiliation,” according to the2024 US Intelligence Community’s Annual Threat Assessment. “While these violent extremists tend to leverage simple attack methods, they can have devastating, outsized consequences.”
Yet it would be a mistake to focus too narrowly on Crooks’ character or political affiliation in attempting to make sense of the current US political climate. The polarization, the movement to the poles, the rising radicalization – are not just left (including ecological or animal-rights extremism, anarchists) or right (including racially or ethnically motivated extremism) problems. They are brewing on both sides of the aisle, especially as the center has become hollowed out.
When Trump was reported to have shouted “Fight” after being pierced by a bullet on Saturday, he was being heard. His message resonated with those who want to see him be returned to the White House in November, and those who just as desperately want to see him lose.
Security will be stepped up at rallies, this week’s Republican National Convention, August’s Democratic National Convention, and across all campaign stops. But as grievances grow, as fight talk and candidate fitness persist, so too will the shadow of political violence.
Lindsay Newman is the practice head of Global Macro, Geopolitics for Eurasia Group and is based in London. She writes the Views on America column for GZERO.
Slovkia's Prime Minister Robert Fico is in serious condition after being severely wounded in an assassination attempt.
Slovakia "on the brink" after PM shot
Robert Fico, the outspoken, nationalistic prime minister of Slovakia, was severely wounded in an assassination attempt on Wednesday.
Fico was shot while greeting a crowd in a small town in central Slovakia. Police arrested the shooter, whom local media have identified as a 71-year-old disaffected writer and security guard. Slovakia’s interior minister said the shooting was “clearly” politically motivated but would not release info on the suspect.
As of this writing, Fico was in stable but serious condition after undergoing a lengthy surgery.
Slovakia is extremely polarized. Last fall, Fico won a bitterly contested election against the Progressive Slovakia party, running on a platform of halting military aid to Ukraine, rejecting refugees, and defending traditional values.
He’s long been a controversial figure — he last served as PM between 2013 and 2018, when he was ousted amid mass protests over his government’s alleged involvement in the murder of two investigative journalists.
Slovakia is now bracing for more conflict. The interior minister has warned that with tensions high, the country stands on the brink of “civil war.” Members of Fico’s party angrily blamed “progressive media” and the opposition, raising the prospect of violent street-level reprisals. Any moves by the government to exert pressure on the media could quickly stoke tensions with Brussels over EU rules.
More: How and why did Czechoslovakia manage to split up peacefully in 1993? Read our explainerhere.
Bolsonaro tests positive for coronavirus; Trudeau assassination attempt
Ian Bremmer shares his perspective on global politics on this week's World In (More Than) 60 Seconds:
Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, has coronavirus. What are your thoughts and where does this leave Brazil?
Well, I mean, you know, if coronavirus was karmic, and I don't believe that, Bolsonaro would be the president you kind of expect would get it, right? Because he's been saying, "it's just a little flu, don't worry about it, I don't need to wear a mask, everyone can come out and rally, we can hug, we can hold hands, we can shake hands with no problem." He's been doing that for months now and he's exposed to an awful lot of people, both in Brazil and internationally, including in the United States when he traveled to meet with President Trump in Mar a Lago. And now he's taken the test. The 65-year-old president has coronavirus.
He's saying, "I'm fine. Look at me. Look at my face. There's no problem." I hope he's fine. You don't wish ill health on anybody, but you also kind of hope that someone who has gotten it this wrong, with well over 50,000 dead in Brazil, with some of the worst case load of any country in the world after the United States, Brazil is right there with us, and per capita looks considerably worse and their hospitals are starting to get overwhelmed and his popularity is going down. And, you know, their ability to manage this effectively and also keep the economy going is really, really challenged. So, I mean, I've said it before. I'll say it again, among Democratic presidents, Jair Bolsonaro is by far been the worst in handling coronavirus on the health care side, on the cheerleading side, on the fake news side and on the economic side. He's kind of got everything going against him. He's just not handled this well.
Brazil does have a lot of strong governors that do have a strong and reasonably independent judiciary, which has helped the country a lot. Bolsonaro also now is in the middle of growing impeachment cases surrounding him and his family, some of which involves corruption. That's going to dog him for the rest of his term. It's possible he'll even be thrown out like his predecessors, but if not, it's hard to imagine that he's going to be reelected. Brazil is, after all, still a democracy. So, horrible to see all this news in a country that really should be doing pretty well, all things considered. But poor governance makes a real difference, especially in a crisis.
There was an assassination attempt on Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. What's the story?
I'm stunned that the American media has said virtually nothing about this. This was an extremist from Manitoba who gets in his pickup truck, he drives to the prime minister's residence, breaks through the gates with a bunch of, like heavy rifles, like machine guns, and Trudeau is not home, thankfully, and the guy doesn't do great research, thankfully. Turns out to be some QAnon inspired nut job. And the Canadian police, rather than firing on him and killing him, which probably would have happened in the United States and a lot of other countries, actually managed to talk him down and apprehend him. But it's not making much news. I mean, I've talked about it with friends and colleagues here in the United States, it's the first they've heard of it. And I'm honestly a little surprised. I mean, I know that a lot most Americans don't have passports. They don't travel. We don't pay attention to news that isn't in the United States. And Trump dominates everything. But I mean, Trudeau's been covered like America's boyfriend for the last five years by the mainstream media.
You would think an assassination attempt against him would drive coverage in the US. And it really isn't. And it really should. Because, of course, you know, even though we don't have nearly as much of an international terrorist issue in the United States and in Canada as we did say in 9/11 days, we have a very significant domestic terrorism problem in the United States and Canada. And it's been growing. And we're going to need to deal with it. And, you know, thank God that this guy is not only an ideological nut job, but also doesn't know how to plan an assassination, or we could have very, very different news right now from our friendly neighbors to the north.
Finally, Australia resumes lockdown. How are they handling the pandemic?
And the answer is, reasonably well. You know, they are locking down the border between their two largest provinces. They've not done this an enormously long period of time. And it's because there is serious outbreak. But I mean, this is way earlier than you're seeing in the United States. They've largely been following the scientific guidelines from their own health minister, their own government. And that means that when you see an expansion, you shut everything down. And that's helped the Australian numbers overall to be comparatively limited. And it gives them a handle on the spread. They're not doing the job that New Zealand is, much more isolated, shut down their borders completely. All these billionaires that bought their luxury boat holds and now can't even get to the land they own because New Zealand doesn't want a more coronavirus. Australia doesn't have that. They've got economic problems, too, because increasingly there's a trade war happening between Australia and China with an enormous amount of trade and investment going there. But in terms of general governance around coronavirus, Australia not being cheerleader's, not politicizing this overtly, doing a reasonable job. And hopefully that will continue with this response to recent outbreaks.