A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
What The Hell Was That?
Some days, ya’ll. Yesterday was one of them.
Rather than headlining any single one of the day’s weird, troubling, or strange outbursts, Morning Memo will just work through them in rough order of relative importance.
Straight-up Antisemitism
In two separate speeches in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Donald Trump laid a trap for Jewish Americans, blaming them for not supporting him in sufficient numbers given his support for the right-wing government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:
Ground Zero For Trump’s Hate: Springfield, Ohio
Here are the latest developments:
- The small Ohio city under siege from attacks on its Haitian immigrant community by the Trump-Vance ticket is bracing for a possible Trump visit.
- Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who is from the Springfield area, penned a NYT op-ed defending the city, its Haitian immigrants, and the economic revival that they helped to fuel.
- The local health department refuted JD Vance’s race-baiting claims that the influx of Haitian immigrants has caused disease in the city to skyrocket, according to reporting by Greg Sargent.
Harris Puts Abortion Rights Front And Center
- A campaign event in Michigan hosted by Oprah Winfrey and styled like her talk show featured Kamala Harris and the mother of Amber Thurman, the 28-year-old Georgia woman who died after waiting for treatment for complications from an abortion pill.
- The TV-talk-show-style event included appearances by an array of celebrities, including Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lopez, Julia Roberts, and Tracee Ellis Ross.
- Harris is back in Georgia today for an event where she will again focus on abortion rights.
2024 Ephemera
- The Harris campaign outspent the Trump campaign 20-1 in digital advertising on Meta’s platforms in the week surrounding their debate.
- The Trump campaign is making a late push to get Nebraska to change its Electoral College vote allocation to winner-take-all, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is leading the charge.
- Kamala Harris surprises Oprah with her gun ownership:
I See What You Did There
Kamala Harris with a dig at Donald Trump’s “concepts of a plan” for replacing Obamacare:
Kamala Harris: Nobody can start a small business with $5000.
Oprah: That’s a tiny business.
Kamala Harris: A concept of a business, pic.twitter.com/ysaByBmMlh
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 20, 2024
The GOP Is Stuck With Mark Robinson
The deadline for removing Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R-NC), the GOP nominee for governor, from the ballot passed at 12:01 a.m. ET today without any action. And so it appears that Republicans will ride this broken horse all the way to the finish line in November despite another bombshell revelation about Robinson’s conduct before entering public life.
The CNN story that had been rumored all day finally landed with enough force to sink any other candidate. But since March 2023, when TPM’s Hunter Walker first surfaced Robinson’s Facebook posts railing against gays, Blacks, and Jews, Robinson has managed to endure a series of stunning revelations without abandoning his Trump-endorsed candidacy.
By every account, the CNN story can’t quite capture how sordid the Robinson posts it uncovered actually are. Calling himself a “Black Nazi” is just a sampling. The well from which CNN drew makes NSFW look like a Disney movie.
It was almost comical when additional reporting chimed in that Robinson’s email was in the leak-and-dump Ashley Madison episode from a few years ago.
The calculus for Republicans has changed dramatically in North Carolina, where Biden’s exit from the race and Harris’ entry have put the state in play in a way that could seriously upend Trump’s path to Electoral College victory.
Curb Your Enthusiasm For The Salacious, Dear Reader
Olivia Nuzzi, the Washington correspondent for New York Magazine, is on leave after it was publicly revealed that she had a personal relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during his presidential campaign.
After news of the relationship broke, Nuzzi issued a statement in which she did not name RFK Jr. but conceded that “earlier this year, the nature of some communication” between herself “and a former reporting subject turned personal.” She said “[t]he relationship was never physical” but she regretted not disclosing it. A spokesperson for RFK Jr. said: “Mr. Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece.”
TPM regulars will recall that Nuzzi, then 20, first appeared on TPM more than a decade ago, when Hunter Walker was covering Anthony Weiner’s NYC mayoral campaign, which lashed out ferociously at Nuzzi, a former intern, for going public about the inner workings of the campaign.
New Court Filing Puts Gaetz And 17-Year-Old Girl At Sex Party
NOTUS: “Rep. Matt Gaetz attended a drug-fueled sex party in 2017 with the 17-year-old girl at the center of the alleged sex trafficking scandal, according to legal documents filed to a Florida federal court shortly before midnight Thursday, which cite sealed affidavits from three eyewitness testimonies.”
Alaska Man Charged With Threatening 6 SCOTUS Justices
A 76-year-old Alaska man was indicted and arrested on charges that he allegedly sent more than 465 messages through the Supreme Court’s public website threatening to torture and assassinate six justices. The justices have not been publicly identified.
For Your Radar …
AP: “The U.S. military has moved about 130 soldiers along with mobile rocket launchers to a desolate island in the Aleutian chain of western Alaska amid a recent increase in Russian military planes and vessels approaching American territory.”
Stat Of The Day
Francis S. Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health:
The statistic that gives me the deepest heartache is this: More than 230,000 Americans died unnecessarily between June 2021 and March 2022, largely because misinformation caused them to turn away from what might have saved them in the midst of a dangerous pandemic, according to an assessment from the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation. This death rate is the equivalent of four fully loaded 737s crashing every day.
Live Your Weekend The Way Shohei Ohtani Plays Baseball
On Thursday afternoon, Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers had what is arguably the greatest regular season game in the history of major league baseball.
With the sporting world already watching because Ohtani was poised to pass a never-before reached milestone – 50 home runs and 50 steals in the same season – he proceeded to have a game for the ages, going 6-for-6 at the plate, hitting 3 home runs, stealing two bases, and generally having an otherworldly performance against the lowly Miami Marlins:
Enjoy a [lovely] weekend!
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