“Immanent” doesn’t mean at any moment. It means it’s inherent and basic, inseparable, core to its very being. “Imminent” on the other hand means soon, about to happen. And you know what? They both refer to Donald Trump. Eminently.
When? Well, the D.C. grand jury typically meets Tuesdays and Thursdays. Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said indictments may come in August and that starts Tuesday.
Meanwhile …
AP:
Who’s in, who’s out: A look at which candidates have qualified for the 1st GOP presidential debate
With less than a month to go until the first Republican presidential debate of the 2024 campaign, seven candidates say they have met qualifications for a spot on stage in Milwaukee.
But that also means that about half the broad GOP field is running short on time to make the cut.
Mike Pence has not yet qualified for the debate. I guess the people who tried to hang him don’t want to donate to him.
Shane Goldmacher/New York Times:
Trump Crushing DeSantis and G.O.P. Rivals, Times/Siena Poll Finds
The twice-indicted former president leads across nearly every category and region, as primary voters wave off concerns about his escalating legal jeopardy.
Below those lopsided top-line figures were other ominous signs for Mr. DeSantis. He performed his weakest among some of the Republican Party’s biggest and most influential constituencies. He earned only 9 percent support among voters at least 65 years old and 13 percent of those without a college degree. Republicans who described themselves as “very conservative” favored Mr. Trump by a 50-point margin, 65 percent to 15 percent.
Alex Seitz-Wald/NBC:
Trump's rivals let GOP voters believe he's a winner — and it's coming back to bite them
Trump's rivals hoped to appeal to conservatives fed up with losing, but they never called out his 2020 loss. Now GOP voters believe Trump can win again.
Most of the 2024 candidate field has spent the past two and half years validating or turning a blind eye to Trump’s false claims that he won the 2020 election, priming the Republican base to believe that Trump is a proven winner against President Joe Biden. Now they have only a few months to try to undo that perception but appear reluctant to press the case.
“A lot of these GOP primary contenders are paying the price of enabling Trump throughout the course of the last three years,” said former Florida Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Trump critic. “The best way to beat him is by ... showing that Trump and his movement have been rejected in general elections three times in a row. But you don’t hear [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis or the other candidates speaking to voters in this way. It’s impossible to defeat someone by following them.”
Washington Post:
Trump gains advantage as states set delegate selection rules
New California rules could favor Trump while also making it harder for challengers like DeSantis to make it a two-person race
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign notched a major victory Saturday when members of the California Republican executive committee voted to parcel out convention delegates based on the statewide vote next year — doing away with the state’s longtime system of awarding them by congressional district, which had been perceived as a more level playing field for lower-tiered candidates.
The new rules give Trump a shot at clinching all of the state’s 169 delegates — more than any other state — while at the same time making it harder for a challenger like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to make it a two-person race.
The dramatic shift in the rules, which came during a closed-door meeting Saturday in Irvine, was denounced as an underhanded political maneuver by allies of DeSantis, Trump’s leading opponent for the nomination, who tried to prevent the change and are now reconsidering their investments in the state.
On the one hand, the DeSantis team has a point. On the other, it continues his losing streak, and where it matters (the delegate count).
Rolling Stone has a jaded Ed Rollins commenting on Ron Desantis:
Last year, longtime Republican strategist Ed Rollins was leading the Ready for Ron PAC, and announcing his plans to help DeSantis — then an undeclared 2024 candidate — take on Trump in the primary. A longtime Trump supporter, Rollins wanted to turn the page on the twice-impeached former president, and he thought DeSantis was the candidate to do it. But in just a few months, that hope vanished. Today, Rollins says he is “not involved” anymore in the pro-DeSantis efforts.
“I don’t think it’s the campaign’s fault at all; it’s his,” Rollins tells Rolling Stone. “I think he’s been a very flawed candidate. I know some of the people around him, and some of them are good, talented people. But every time he opens his mouth, he has a tendency to — shall we say — think out-loud, and he clearly doesn’t understand the game. … When you get into these culture wars the way that he has, the vast majority of people don’t understand what they are.
But Rollins doesn’t see another threat to Trump in the 2024 primary field: “At this point in time, I would be shocked if Trump were not the nominee.”
Rollins is also predicting that, “unless something serious happens,” President Biden is on track toward reelection.
Lori Rozsa/Washington Post:
Does DeSantis have a Florida problem? Trump dominates in the Sunshine State.
The Republican governor is running on a platform to ‘Make America Florida.’ But his support back home is showing signs of teetering.
The warning signs were there even before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis stepped onto the stage at a luxury hotel near Miami.
Ticket sales for the local Republican Party’s biggest annual fundraiser were down by two-thirds. One group of reliable supporters skipped the event entirely. The ballroom at the JW Marriott Turnberry Resort & Spa was far too big for the 380 people who showed up. Staff hustled to arrange paneled “air walls” around the room to make the space look smaller.
When DeSantis arrived at the gathering in early July, he gave what two people who attended described as a familiar and lackluster speech.
“It kind of came off like a bar mitzvah speech,” said a party member who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from Miami-Dade GOP leaders. “The only time people really applauded was when he was introduced, and when he was done. In between it was clanging plates and people talking to each other.”
Susan B. Glasser/New Yorker:
The Boss and His Botched Coverup
The latest charges against Donald Trump show him and his Mar-a-Lago band to be as lame as the Watergate plumbers.
News is, by definition, hard to predict. For most of this year, many economists had been expecting a recession—some declared it all but a certainty—but, on Wednesday, the Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell revealed that his staff is no longer forecasting a prolonged downturn. A day later, U.S. growth data for the second quarter of 2023 came in at an unexpectedly strong annual rate of 2.4 per cent. Consumer confidence is rebounding. “In hopeful moment, storm clouds over Biden economy appear to lift,” a Washington Post headline ran. In recent months, the Gallup poll has found that more than eighty per cent of Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the country. Is it too much to think that, with the brighter economic environment, the gloomy mind-set of the electorate may also soon improve? At the White House, the development was greeted as vindication—proof of “Bidenomics in action,” as a statement from the President put it. In a period filled with grim announcements about war abroad and extremism at home, this surely counted as a good day.
It was not, however, the only good news for which the White House was waiting. Last week, Donald Trump revealed that he had received a target letter, from the Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith, which threatened to prosecute the former President for his efforts to overturn Biden’s win in the 2020 election. Washington had been braced ever since for a new indictment of Trump—the big one, at last. Smith’s grand jury in D.C. met on Tuesday and Thursday; surely, it was thought, the indictment would happen then. But, by the time Thursday ended, no new case against Trump was forthcoming. Instead, prosecutors revealed major new allegations against Trump in the pending classified-documents case that Smith filed last month.
In non-Trump/Desantis news:
Will Bunch/Philadelphia Inquirer:
Project 2025 is GOPers’ blueprint for destroying the planet. It must be stopped.
It sounds insane: In a summer of 110-degree heat waves and killer floods, GOPers draft a 2025 scheme to end all action on climate change.
While you were turning up the air-conditioning or trying to find an open city pool, the brain trust of the conservative movement — including key officials of Donald Trump’s disastrous 2017-21 presidency — were spending $22 million to craft a 950-page plan called Project 2025 that (among other things) is a blueprint for unconditional surrender in the war on climate change. The scheme drafted by the Heritage Foundation and other think tanks that have guided GOP administrations since Ronald Reagan wouldn’t just halt the desperately needed transition to clean energy and electric cars, but restore the unchecked hegemony of burning fossil fuels.
Fetterman recaps six months in Congress: ‘Fixation on a lot of dumb s—‘
The freshman senator said everything in Washington is turning into a “culture war,” adding that not everything “has to be a think piece.”
Specifically pointing to the debt ceiling, he claimed in the interview that here shouldn’t have been drama.
“The fact that we’re playing with something like that is antithetical to the stability of our democracy,” he argued, calling everyone in Washington “cynical.”
“But we can fight for things that are meaningful,” Fetterman said, adding, “We’re fighting for women’s reproductive freedom, making sure we have resources and support our unions. I’m going to fight for what’s really important.”
Wall Street Journal:
How the U.S. Economy Is Sticking the Soft Landing
Companies are pulling back but are reluctant to make job cuts that could spur a recession
To see what an economic soft landing looks like, search no further than business hiring.
Parts of the economy are cooling, just as the Federal Reserve would like to see to combat inflation. Freight railroads, for instance, are seeing shipping volumes decline. Construction firms are cutting back on equipment purchases. A vending-machine company’s customers are negotiating prices downward.
Yet the key to a measured, inflation-busting slowdown that doesn’t sink the economy lies in whether companies hold on to workers or lay them off. And the answer, in an economy that otherwise can send repeated mixed signals, is clear: They are making a priority of keeping workers. Apple, for one, is avoiding layoffs despite economic uncertainty.
All those retained workers, in turn, are spending their paychecks, albeit more slowly. So the economy appears to be steadily cooling, while averting the long-anticipated recession.